[R] data frames; matching/merging

[Jonathan]

Hi all,
    I'm feeling a little guilty to ask this question, since I've
written a solution using a rather clunky for loop that gets the job
done.  But I'm convinced there must be a faster (and probably more
elegant) way to accomplish what I'm looking to do (perhaps using the
"merge" function?).  I figured somebody out there might've already
figured this out:

I have a dataframe with two columns (let's call them V1 and V2).  All
rows are unique, although column V1 has several redundant entries.

Ex:

     V1     V2
1    a        3
2    a        2
3    b        9
4    c        4
5    a        7
6    b        11


What I'd like is to return a dataframe cut down to have only unique
entires in V1.  V2 should contain a vector, for each V1, that is the
minimum of all the possible choices from the set of redundant V1's.

Example output:

      V1     V2
1     a        2
2     b        9
3     c        4


If somebody could (relatively easily) figure out how to get closer to
a solution, I'd appreciate hearing how.  Also, I'd be interested to
hear how you came upon the answer (so I can get better at searching
the R resources myself).

Regards,
Jonathan