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From: joey@tessi.UUCP (Joe Pruett)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: grep replacement
Message-ID: <470@q7.tessi.UUCP>
Date: 30 May 88 18:37:09 GMT
References: <7882@alice.UUCP> <5630@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> <6866@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <4524@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com> <1036@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU>
Organization: TSSI, Beaverton, Oregon
Lines: 14

>
>> There have been times when I wanted a grep that would print out the
>> first occurrence and then stop.
>
>grep '(your_pattern_here)' | head -1

This works, but is quite slow if the input to grep is large.  A hack
I've made to egrep is a switch of the form -<number>.  This causes only
the first <number> matches to be printed, and then the next file is
searched.  This is great for:

egrep -1 ^Subject *

in a news directory to get a list of Subject lines.