PHP & grep

Greetings learned PHP(eople) I`m using the following to strip values out of a file, however, the file I`m accessing contains multiple instance of the search criteria, and I only wanna return the first instance.... Im just getting an empty variable and cant figure it out... $criteria = grep "Files :" logs/$file; I`ve tried other things like 'grep --max-count=1 "Files :"...etc etc, and that don`t work Also tried shellexecarg (`grep blah blah blah);......still not working Any ideas -- Chris Blake Office : (011) 782-0840 Cell : 083 985 0379 A chicken is the eggs way of producing more eggs.