/r2/. All operations involve network I/O to the remote object store.
Uses aioboto3 against R2’s S3-compatible API.
For credential setup, see R2 Setup.
Config
R2Resource(config) takes an R2Config object with the bucket name and
either account_id (endpoint is auto-built as
https://{account_id}.r2.cloudflarestorage.com) or an explicit
endpoint_url. Both READ and WRITE modes are supported.
Filesystem Layout
The R2 resource maps object keys to virtual paths under the mount prefix. R2 “directories” are prefix-based — there are no real directory objects. For example, if bucketmy-bucket contains:
/r2/ exposes:
/r2/assets/logo.png maps to R2 key
assets/logo.png.
Cache
The R2 resource usesIndexCacheStore with index_ttl = 600
(10 minutes). Directory listings are cached for up to 600 seconds before
being refreshed from R2. This reduces API calls for repeated directory
traversals.
Example
Shell Commands
The R2 resource supports the full set of shell commands since it operates on real file content (text, binary, JSON, CSV, etc.). Large files benefit from range reads to avoid downloading entire objects.Read Commands
| Command | Notes |
|---|---|
cat | Read file content |
head / tail | First/last N lines |
grep / rg | Pattern search (file or directory level) |
jq | Query JSON fields |
wc | Line/word/byte counts |
stat | File metadata (name, size, type, modified) |
find | Recursive search with -name, -maxdepth |
tree | Directory tree view |
nl | Number lines |
du | Disk usage summary |
file | Detect file type |
strings | Extract printable strings from binary |
xxd | Hex dump |
md5 | MD5 checksum |
sha256sum | SHA-256 checksum |
Text Processing
| Command | Notes |
|---|---|
awk | Pattern scanning and processing |
sed | Stream editor |
tr | Translate or delete characters |
sort | Sort lines |
uniq | Remove duplicate lines |
cut | Extract fields/columns |
join | Join lines on a common field |
paste | Merge lines side by side |
column | Columnate output |
fold | Wrap lines to a specified width |
expand | Convert tabs to spaces |
unexpand | Convert spaces to tabs |
fmt | Simple text formatter |
rev | Reverse lines |
tac | Concatenate and print in reverse |
look | Display lines beginning with a given string |
shuf | Shuffle lines |
tsort | Topological sort |
comm | Compare two sorted files |
cmp | Compare two files byte by byte |
diff | Compare files line by line |
patch | Apply a diff patch |
iconv | Character encoding conversion |
File Operations
| Command | Notes |
|---|---|
cp | Copy files |
mv | Move/rename files |
rm | Remove files |
mkdir | Create directories |
touch | Create empty file or update timestamp |
ln | Create symbolic links |
tee | Write stdin to file and stdout |
mktemp | Create temporary file |
split | Split file into pieces |
csplit | Split file by context |
Path Utilities
| Command | Notes |
|---|---|
basename | Strip directory from path |
dirname | Strip filename from path |
realpath | Resolve path |
readlink | Print symbolic link target |
ls | List directory contents |
Compression
| Command | Notes |
|---|---|
gzip | Compress files |
gunzip | Decompress gzip files |
zip | Create zip archives |
unzip | Extract zip archives |
tar | Archive files |
zcat | Cat compressed files |
zgrep | Grep compressed files |
Encoding
| Command | Notes |
|---|---|
base64 | Base64 encode/decode |
Data Format Support
Commands with format-specific variants for structured data files:| Format | Extension | Variants |
|---|---|---|
| Parquet | .parquet | cat, head, tail, wc, stat, cut, grep, ls, file |
| Feather | .feather | cat, head, tail, wc, stat, cut, grep, ls, file |
| ORC | .orc | cat, head, tail, wc, stat, cut, grep, ls, file |
| HDF5 | .hdf5 | cat, head, tail, wc, stat, cut, grep, ls, file |
Use Cases
- AI agents accessing R2 data: Mount R2 buckets for agents to read and process datasets
- Data pipelines: Read and write R2 objects with shell-like commands
- FUSE mounting: Expose R2 buckets through a virtual FUSE mount for external tools