grep -m in solaris/sun OS

Question

I searched a lot over google and stackoverflow/serverfault, but I was not able to find a corresponding to "-m" option in the bash shell. I need to fetch only the first result with the grep. Is this possible in the sun-os/solaris?

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 13 '13 at 14:01

5

There is no -m option to the Solaris grep. The -m N switch stops reading a file after N lines have been matched. If all you want is N lines of output then you could use

grep test file | head -N

where N is the number of lines of output that you want.

answered Feb 13 '13 at 14:01

user9517

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If you have the SUNWggrp package installed then you can use GNU grep from `/usr/sfw/bin/ggrep`. – James O'Gorman Feb 13 '13 at 17:09
@JamesO'Gorman: ggrep - no wonder I couldn't find it :( – user9517 Feb 13 '13 at 17:30
There is also CSWgrep from OpenCSW. While it installs grep as `/opt/csw/bin/ggrep`, you also have the `/opt/csw/gnu` directory with symlinks, using the original names. – automaciej Feb 13 '13 at 21:06

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 13 '13 at 14:01

2

You would need GNU grep to use the -m option. You could use awk or sed in Solaris instead, if you do not want to use GNU grep:

awk '$0 ~ var{print;exit}' var=$string mytextfile

answered Feb 13 '13 at 14:01

colealtdelete

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On Solaris 10 you need to use nawk to get this to work. – user9517 Feb 13 '13 at 14:08

grep -m in solaris/sun OS

2 Answers2