That works, as well as the Perl version I've been using: perl -ne 'print if ($. == 1 || /pattern/)'
But timings for a real-life example (3GB file with ~16m lines, CentOS 7) show the problem: grep (v2.20): ~1.15s perl (v5.36.1): ~4.48s awk (v4.0.2): ~10.81s Admittedly grep is just searching in those timings, but I suspect it could accomplish the full task with a minimal decrease in speed. Dan On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 12:57 PM <arn...@skeeve.com> wrote: > Daniel Green <ddgr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I'm frequently searching CSV files with 20-30 columns, and when there's a > > hit it can be hard to know what the columns are. An option to also print > > the first line of a file (either always, or only if that file had a match > > to the pattern) in addition to any hits would be nice. > > > > Thanks, > > Dan > > It sounds like awk would be a better tool: > > awk 'FNR == 1 || /pattern/' files ... > > should do the trick. > > HTH, > > Arnold >