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 would do this in awk instead.

find . -name \*.coffee -exec awk '/re/ {print FILENAME ":" $0;exit}' {} \;

If you didn't need to recurse, you could just do it with awk:

awk '/re/ {print FILENAME ":" $0;nextfile}' *.coffee

Or, if you're using a current enough bash, you can use globstar:

shopt -s globstar
awk '/re/ {print FILENAME ":" $0;nextfile}' **/*.coffee