Re: [PATCH] find: add option -fail_exec

On 5/21/25 19:24, Tavian Barnes wrote:
> On Wed, May 21, 2025 at 1:51 AM Bernhard Voelker
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> [snip]
>> Although I like in general the idea to have more control over
>> exit values in the caller, I have the suspicion that mapping to
>> EXIT_FAILURE may be too simple:
>>
>> How to distinguish that from other find(1) errors?
>> In your case 0 vs. non-Zero seems to be sufficient.
>> But other / future use cases might need to directly pass back
>> the exit value transparently (or even mapped) to find's exit code?
>> For that, extending your approach might be problematic.
> 
> One idea would be to take the exit status from the command itself.  So if you do
> 
>      $ find -fail_exec -exec sh -c 'cat "$1" || exit 42' sh {} \;
> 
> then find would exit(42) if cat fails.

yes, that was one future possible expansion I was thinking of.

>> For the user, it is already confusing to have so many flavors:
>>         -exec COMMAND ;     -exec COMMAND {} +     -ok COMMAND ;
>>         -execdir COMMAND ;  -execdir COMMAND {} +  -okdir COMMAND ;
>> So adding another one adds complexity.
> 
> Unless I'm misreading it, the given patch doesn't add another variant
> like that, it just adds an option.  So usage would look like
> 
>      $ find -fail_exec -exec false + {}

Ah, yes, you're right.  I misread that completely.

>> On 5/20/25 22:56, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
>>   > So would you please describe further your use cases with some
>>   > examples?
>>
>> P.S. It makes sense looking over the fence as well:
>> does one of the other find(1) implementations have such a feature
>> already, and how is it solved there?
> 
> NetBSD find has -exit [status], so there you could write something like
> 
>      $ find -exec cmd {} \; -o -exit 42
> 
> See https://man.netbsd.org/find.1

Actually I like that:

a) there's precedence in another implementation already,

b) to have a -exit action with exit code is also useful in combination
with other tests:

      # Find world-writable files in $HOME.
      find "$HOME" -not -type l -perm /002 -ls -exit 99;
      case $? in
        0) ;; #fine.
        99) echo UGGH; exit 99;;
        *)  echo 'other find error' >&2; exit 1;
      esac

And -exit without a number is a synonym for -quit.
That's also easy to remember.

Have a nice day,
Berny