Subset with unique cases, based on multiple columns

You can use the plyr package:

library(plyr)

ddply(df, c("v1","v2","v3"), head, 1)
#   v1 v2 v3  v4 v5
# 1  7  1  A 100 98
# 2  7  2  A  98 97
# 3  8  1  C  NA 80
# 4  9  3  C  75 75

ddply(df, c("v1","v2","v3"), function(x) if(nrow(x)>1) x else NULL)
#   v1 v2 v3 v4 v5
# 1  8  1  C NA 80
# 2  8  1  C 78 75
# 3  8  1  C 50 62

You can use the duplicated() function to find the unique combinations:

> df[!duplicated(df[1:3]),]
  v1 v2 v3  v4 v5
1  7  1  A 100 98
2  7  2  A  98 97
3  8  1  C  NA 80
6  9  3  C  75 75

To get only the duplicates, you can check it in both directions:

> df[duplicated(df[1:3]) | duplicated(df[1:3], fromLast=TRUE),]
  v1 v2 v3 v4 v5
3  8  1  C NA 80
4  8  1  C 78 75
5  8  1  C 50 62

Using dplyr you could do:

library(dplyr)

# distinct
df %>% 
  distinct(v1, v2, v3, .keep_all = T)

# non-distinct only
df %>% 
  group_by(v1, v2, v3) %>% 
  filter(n() > 1)

# exclude any non-distinct
df %>% 
  group_by(v1, v2, v3) %>% 
  filter(n() == 1)