[ARROW-9870] [R] Friendly interface for filesystems (S3)

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.0
• Component/s: R
• Labels: pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/25906
• Assignee: Neal Richardson
• Reporter: Neal Richardson
• Created: 26/Aug/20 22:04
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 08:09
• Resolved: 09/Oct/20 23:15

Description

The Filesystem methods don't provide a human-friendly interface for basic operations like ls, mkdir, etc. Since we provide access to S3 and potentially other cloud storage, it would be nice to have simple methods for exploring it.

Additional ideas:

• S3Bucket class/constructor: it's basically a SubTreeFileSystem containing S3FS and a path, except that we can auto-detect a bucket's region.
• Add a class like the FileLocator C++ struct list(fs, path). also kinda like a SubTreeFileSystem, but with different methods and intents. Aside from use in ls/mkdir/cp, it could be used in file reader/writers instead of having an extra filesystem argument added everywhere, e.g. fs$path("path/to/file"). See https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/8197#discussion_r494325934

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #8351