grep replacement

[Bruce G. Barnett]

In article <1036 at cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU> wyatt at 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 	<barnett at ge-crd.ARPA> <barnett at steinmetz.UUCP>
				uunet!steinmetz!barnett