How to match once per file in grep?
I think you can just do something like
grep -ri -m1 --include '*.coffee' 're' . | head -n 2to e.g. pick the first match from each file, and pick at most two matches total.
Note that this requires your grep to treat -m as a per-file match limit; GNU grep does do this, but BSD grep apparently treats it as a global match limit.
I would do this in awk instead.
find . -name \*.coffee -exec awk '/re/ {print FILENAME ":" $0;exit}' {} \;If you didn't need to recurse, you could just do it with awk:
awk '/re/ {print FILENAME ":" $0;nextfile}' *.coffeeOr, if you're using a current enough bash, you can use globstar:
shopt -s globstarawk '/re/ {print FILENAME ":" $0;nextfile}' **/*.coffee