Thanks James, >> Thank you so much for the detailed response. I didn't know I can >> simply use 'head' to get what I need. > > There is a difference between the two approaches. Writing through > a pipe to "head -8" will kill the writer when the 9th result is > printed. If the cost of finding an additional match is significant > (or only N matches exist) then there is a potential waste of resources > involved in finding the extra match. For most uses this is not a big > deal and the approach using "head" works just fine.
Do you think it would make sense to implement (yet) another option to find? It could be something like -maxresults N and would do exactly that - stop the search after finding N matches. I use it for generating a report for the administrator - I don't need full results because they are not processed automatically anyway. I'm not sure if more people could find something like maxresults usable. cheers, Tomek
