[SOLVED] Bash - find exec return value

Issue

I need a way to tell if grep does find something, and ideally pass that return value to an if statement.

Let's say I have a tmp folder (current folder), in that there are several files and sub-folders. I want to search all files named abc for a pattern xyz. The search is assumed to be successful if it finds any occurrence of xyz (it does not matter how many times xyz is found). The search fails if no occurrence of xyz is found.

In bash, it can be done like this:

find . -name "abc" -exec grep "xyz" {} \;

That would show if xyz is found at all. But I'm not sure how pass the result (successful or not) back to an if statement.

Any help would be appreciated.

Solution

You can try

x=`find . -name abc | xargs grep xyz`
echo $x

Or, to properly handle whitespaces and endlines in filenames:

x=`find . -name abc -print0 | xargs -0 grep xyz`
echo $x

That is, x contains your return value. It is blank when there is no match.

Answered By - Alain

Answer Checked By - Clifford M. (WPSolving Volunteer)