Re: Quit after finding first N files

[James Youngman]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Nexor <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi James,

Netiquette point: please don't reply directly, if you keep your reply
on the mailing list, others can benefit.

> Thank you so much for the detailed response. I didn't know I can
> simply use 'head' to get what I need.

There is a difference between the two approaches.     Writing through
a pipe to "head -8" will kill the writer when the 9th result is
printed.   If the cost of finding an additional match is significant
(or only N matches exist) then there is a potential waste of resources
involved in finding the extra match.   For most uses this is not a big
deal and the approach using "head" works just fine.

James.