On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 12:33:19PM +0200, Albretch Mueller wrote: > > "grep -l" will stop at the first hit, so even if you could ask > > grep which one of the alternatives it found, it'll miss Hegel > > in a file where Kant figures first. Is that what you want? > > Yes, I am fine with that. I include the matches in the Array in a way > that the first one is the most important to me anyway, but I need to > know which one, which I think should be someone possible, since grep > must go through the array using some index, no?
OK, if you just want the first hit, there is "--max-count" (aka "-m"), which you can use with the combined regular expression. This (given the value 1) will spit out the first matching line, which you can then post-process to extract the exact match. Post-processing is left as an exercise to the reader :-) That should be about as fast as "grep -l" can get, take or give. Cheers -- tomás
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