grep a specific amount of occurrence

boaz733 · July 8, 2012, 6:52am

hey , i m trying to figure out how to do the following :

i got a text file the looks like so:

i want to grep a specific amount of a value , for example
grep of "16500" for 3 occurrences the output will be:

16500
16500
16500

note that this is a part of a table i dont want to just print the value - X times.

please advise
thanks.

drl · July 8, 2012, 1:22pm

Hi.

For GNU grep:

       -m NUM, --max-count=NUM
              Stop reading a file after NUM matching lines.
-- excerpt from man grep, q.v.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

alister · July 8, 2012, 1:57pm

If you do not have GNU grep, you can do it with awk (the specifics depend on what your data looks like).

Regards,
Alister

vagar11 · August 1, 2012, 3:53am

egrep -i '16500' | wc -l

i think it will do it.

bakunin · August 6, 2012, 4:40am

This will count the occurrences of "16500" but not limit the result set to a specific number of them. There is the "-c" switch of grep for that, btw..

grep <regexp> | head -<number>

Will give you the first <number> of hits, while

grep <regexp> | tail -<number>

will give you the last <number> of hits.

I hope this helps.

bakunin