So I have a string at the beginning of a line and can find all of them. I am using ^$string to match and I have thousands of these and an error occurs on a specific line. Let's say I was trying to get to the 100th occurrence of this pattern how would I do so?

For example, I can grep ^$string and list all but I would like to find a specific one.

CodePudding user response：

grep has -m / --max-count option:

grep -m100 '^String' | tail -1

will give you the 100th matched line.

Note:

• the -m100 will make grep stop reading the input file if 100 matches are hit. It's pretty useful if you are reading a huge file
• the tail command is very fast since it doesn't read the content.

CodePudding user response：

You can use sed to print only a single line of your grep's output :

grep "^$string" inputFile | sed -n '100p'

-n has output disabled by default, 100p prints the input to the output stream for the 100th line only.

Or as @dan mentions in the comments :

grep "^$string" inputFile | sed '100!d; 100q'