How to stop the find command after first match?

Question

Is there a way to make the find command to stop right after finding the first match?

Answer 1

With GNU find, you can use the -quit predicate:

find . ... -print -quit

If all you do is printing the name, and assuming the filenames don't contain newline characters, you could do:

find . ... -print | head -n 1

That will not stop find after the first match, but possibly, depending on timing upon the second match or later. Basically, find will be terminated with a SIGPIPE when it tries to output something while head is already gone because it has already read and displayed the first line of input.

If you're doing more than printing the paths of the found files, you could try this approach:

find . ... -exec bash -c 'printf "%s\n" "$1"; kill "$PPID"' bash {} \;

(replace printf with whatever you would be doing with that file).

That has the side effect of find returning an exit status reflecting the fact that it was killed though.

Actually, using the SIGPIPE signal instead of SIGTERM (kill -s PIPE instead of kill) will cause some shells to be more silent about that death (but would still return a non-zero exit status).

Answer 2

For entertainment purposes, here's a lazy find generator in Bash. This example generates a ring over the files in the current directory. Read however many you want then kill %+ (maybe just 1)

#!/usr/bin/env bash
unset -v files n
trap 'kill "$x_PID"' EXIT

coproc x while :; do
    find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec sh -c "$(</dev/fd/3)" _ {} +
done 4<&0 <<\EOF 3<&0 <&4-
for x; do
    read -r _
    printf '%s\0' "$x"
done
EOF

while
    echo >&${x[1]}
    IFS= read -rd '' -u "$x" 'files[n++]'
do
    printf '%q ' "${files[@]}"
    echo
    sleep .2
done