How to match once per file in grep?

Question

Is there any grep option that let\'s me control total number of matches but stops at first match on each file?

Example:

If I do this grep -ri --include \'*

Answer 1

I think you can just do something like

grep -ri -m1 --include '*.coffee' 're' . | head -n 2

to e.g. pick the first match from each file, and pick at most two matches total.

Note that this requires your grep to treat -m as a per-file match limit; GNU grep does do this, but BSD grep apparently treats it as a global match limit.