How do I make find fail if -exec fails?

Question

When I run this command in the shell (in a non-empty directory):

find . -exec invalid_command_here {} \;

I get this:

find: invalid_command_here: No such file or directory
find: invalid_command_here: No such file or directory
find: invalid_command_here: No such file or directory

(and so on for each file)

I need find to fail after the first error. Is there any way to get this to work? I can't use xargs, as I have spaces in my path, but I need the script calling this to return an error code.

Answer 1

This is a limitation of find. The POSIX standard specifies that the return status of find is 0 unless an error occurred while traversing the directories; the return status of executed commands doesn't enter into it.

You can make commands write their status to a file or to a descriptor:

find_status_file=$(mktemp findstatus)
: >"$find_status_file"
find … -exec sh -c 'trap "echo \$?" EXIT; invalid_command "$0"' {} \;
if [ -s "$find_status_file" ]; then
  echo 1>&2 "An error occurred"
fi
rm -f "$find_status_file"

Another method, as you discovered, is to use xargs. The xargs commands always processes all files, but returns the status 1 if any of the commands returns a nonzero status.

find … -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 invalid_command

Yet another method is to eschew find and use recursive globbing in the shell instead: **/ means any depth of subdirectories. This requires version 4 or above of bash. Use set -e to halt the script on the first command returning a nonzero status.

shopt -s globstar
set -e
for x in **/*.xml; do invalid_command "$x"; done

Answer 2

I can use this instead:

find . -name *.xml -print0 | xargs -n 1 -0 invalid_command