unique
drops duplicates so that each element in the result is unique (only appears once):
x = c(2, 1, 1, 2, 1)
unique(x)
# 2 1
Values are returned in the order they first appeared.
duplicated
tags each duplicated element:
duplicated(x)
# FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE
anyDuplicated(x) > 0L
is a quick way of checking whether a vector contains any duplicates.