Question

I’m using grep to extract lines across a set of files:

grep somestring *.log

Is it possible to limit the maximum number of matches per file to the last n matches from each file?

Answer 1

Well I think grep does not support to limit N matches from the end of file so this is what you have to do

ls *.log | while read fn; do grep -iH create "$fn" | tail -1; done

Replace tail -1 -1 with N. (-H options is to print the file name else it wont be printed if you are grep in a single file and thats exactly we are doing above)

NOTE: Above soln will work fine with file names with spaces.

For N matches from the start of the file

grep -i -m1 create *.log

Replace -m1 1 with N.