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From: barnett@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: grep replacement
Message-ID: <4537@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 31 May 88 12:43:56 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>
Reply-To: barnett@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 25

In article <1036@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU> wyatt@cfa.harvard.EDU (Bill Wyatt) writes:
|
|> 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

Yes I have tried that. You are missing the point.

Have you ever waited for a computer?  

There are times when I want the first occurrence of a pattern without
reading the entire (i.e. HUGE) file.

Or there are times when I want the first occurrence of a pattern from
hundreds of files, but I don't want to see the pattern more than once.

And yes I know how to write a shell script that does this.

IMHO (sarcasm mode on), it is more efficient to call grep 
once for one hundred files, than to call (grep $* /dev/null|head -1) 
one hundred times. 
-- 
	Bruce G. Barnett 	 
				uunet!steinmetz!barnett