Grep only the first match and stop

Question

I m searching a directory recursively using grep with the following arguments hoping to only return the first match  Unfortunately  it returns more than one -- in-fact two the last time I looked  It seems like I have too many arguments  especially without getting the  desired outcome   -     grep -o -a -m 1 -h -r  Pulsanti Operietur   path to directory   returns   Pulsanti Operietur Pulsanti Operietur   Maybe grep isn t the best way to do this  You tell me  thanks very much

User · Answer

You can use below command if you want to print entire line and file name if the occurrence of particular word in current directory you are searching   grep -m 1 -r  Not caching      head -1

User · Answer

My grep-a-like program ack has a -1 option that stops at the first match found anywhere   It supports the -m 1 that  mvp refers to as well   I put it in there because if I m searching a big tree of source code to find something that I know exists in only one file  it s unnecessary to find it and have to hit Ctrl-C

User · Answer

A single liner  using find   find -type f -exec grep -lm1  PATTERN        -a -quit

User · Answer

You can pipe grep result to head in conjunction with stdbuf    Note  that in order to ensure stopping after Nth match  you need to using stdbuf to make sure grep don t buffer its output   stdbuf -oL grep -rl  pattern      head -n1 stdbuf -oL grep -o -a -m 1 -h -r  Pulsanti Operietur   path to dir   head -n1 stdbuf -oL grep -nH -m 1 -R  django conf urls defaults      head -n1   As soon as head consumes 1 line  it terminated and grep will receive SIGPIPE because it still output something to pipe while head was gone   This assumed that no file names contain newline

User · Answer

-m 1 means return the first match in any given file  But it will still continue to search in other files  Also  if there are two or more matched in the same line  all of them will be displayed   You can use head -1 to solve this problem   grep -o -a -m 1 -h -r  Pulsanti Operietur   path to dir   head -1   explanation of each grep option   -o  --only-matching  print only the matched part of the line  instead of the entire line  -a  --text  process a binary file as if it were text -m 1  --max-count  stop reading a file after 1 matching line -h  --no-filename  suppress the prefixing of file names on output -r  --recursive  read all files under a directory recursively

[grep] Grep only the first match and stop

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