Only find first few matched files using find

find

Say there may be hundreds of *.txt files in a directory. I only want to find the first three *.txt files and then exit the searching process.

How to achieve this using the find utility? I had a quick through on its man page, seemed not such a option for this.

Best Answer

You could pipe the output of find through head:

find . -name '*.txt' | head -n 3

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Bash find xargs grep only single occurence

Simply keep it within the realm of find:

find . -type f -exec grep "something" {} \; -quit

This is how it works:

The -exec will work when the -type f will be true. And because grep returns 0 (success/true) when the -exec grep "something" has a match, the -quit will be triggered.

How to find first match in multiple files

Just use the -m option of GNU grep which stops reading the file after (in the example) one match.

find dir -iname '*.ext' -exec grep -m 1  'pattern' {} \;

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash find xargs grep only single occurence

How to find first match in multiple files

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