grep replacement

[Joe Pruett]

>
>> 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.