Fail on findings, while continuing and printing output

[katexochen]

A common situation I find myself in is using fd for writing some check, i.e. in CI. For such jobs, I'd like to exit with an error code if I have a match. However, I also would like to get all matches and the output printed. I couldn't find a nice way of doing this with other commands yet, any ideas?

[tavianator]

There is a way to delay an error to the end of execution with find: the -exec command ... {} + syntax will cause find to exit with a non-zero status if any invocation of the command fails, but it won't stop execution right away. So something like this:

$ find -name '*err*' -print -exec false {} +
./src/error.rs
./target/release/build/anyhow-50b078fd38fb554c/stderr
...
$ echo $?
1

Actually now that I think of it, you can do the same thing with fd -X, it's just a little more effort to have it also print the results:

$ fd err -X printf '%s\n' {} \; -X false {} \;
./src/error.rs
./target/release/build/jemalloc-sys-45a83dd636cff359/stderr
...
$ echo $?
1

[katexochen]

Thanks, -X is a good idea. However, I'm using --exec in my commands, which cannot be combined with --exec-batch (not sure why).

[tavianator]

Ah, then you may be stuck with find. Something like

$ find -name '*foo*' -exec false {} + -exec bar {} \;

[katexochen]

Might the + semantic of find be worth a feature request?

[tavianator]

The {} + semantic of find is just -X. It might be a reasonable feature request to allow combining -x with -X. I'm not sure why that's forbidden.