Group by multiple columns and sum other multiple columns

Question

I have a data frame with about 200 columns, out of them I want to group the table by first 10 or so which are factors and sum the rest of the columns.

I have list of

Answer 1

This seems like a task for ddply (I use the 'baseball' dataset which is included with plyr):

library(plyr)
groupColumns = c("year","team")
dataColumns = c("hr", "rbi","sb")
res = ddply(baseball, groupColumns, function(x) colSums(x[dataColumns]))
head(res)

This gives per groupColumns the sum of the columns specified in dataColumns.