2019-11-11 17:45:03 +0800, Peng Yu: > Hi, > > Sometimes, I'd like to know whether there is nothing found. Is there a > way to let find return none-zero when nothing is found? Thanks. [...]
If using -print, you can pipe to grep '^' if find ... | grep '^'; then echo "find found something, see list above" fi Or if you only care whether it found something: if find ... -print -quit | grep -q '^'; then echo "find found something" fi With find alone, you can use this trick: if find . /error ... -quit; then echo "find foung something" else echo "no file found or error encountered before the first file was found" fi Note that NetBSD's find has a "-exit <status>" predicate, which you could use here to return one different from 0 and the code returned for errors: find . ... -exit 12 case $? in (12) echo found;; (0) echo not there;; (*) echo not sure as there was an error;; esac I don't think GNU find has an equivalent command. -- Stephane
