Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!hscfvax!mohamed From: mohamed@hscfvax.harvard.edu (Mohamed Ellozy) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: new grep Message-ID: <582@hscfvax.harvard.edu> Date: 21 Jun 88 12:20:18 GMT References: <16237@brl-adm.ARPA> Reply-To: mohamed@hscfvax.UUCP (Mohamed Ellozy) Organization: Health Sciences Computing Facility, Harvard University Lines: 18 In article <16237@brl-adm.ARPA> williams@nrl-css.arpa writes: > Al Aho and I are designing a replacement for grep, egrep > and fgrep. The question is what flags should it support and > what kind of patterns ... > > I have always thought it would be nice to print only the first match. > > (Root Boy) Jim Cottrell> >I'll second this. There have been many times when I simply wanted to >detect the presence of a pattern in a file, then stop searching. Combining >this with the -n option can also be useful. Also times when I am searching for something that is close to the start of a long file (e. g. a host that is close to the start of /etc/hosts). I can save time by doing a head -NNN | grep, but I must guess a suitable value for NNN, while a grep that quits after the first match does it for me.