find: How to force a non-zero exit status

Question

I have glossed over the man page for find and -quit seems to partly do what I want, except it will only cause find to return non-zero if an error has occurred. So how can find be forced to return non-zero or at least be spoofed into returning non-zero in a way that is readable to maintainers? So far I have this example:

$ find . -maxdepth 2 -type f \( -exec echo {} \; -o \( -printf "FAIL\n" -a -quit \) \)
./scooby
./shaggy
./velma
./daphne
./fred
$ echo $?
0

But if I replace the echo with a call to false, I get the desired early exit, but no non-zero exit code:

$ find . -maxdepth 2 -type f \( -exec false {} \; -o \( -printf "FAIL\n" -a -quit \) \)
FAIL
$ echo $?
0

Update:

I am trying to get find to return non-zero when -exec returns false, i.e. the command that executed returned non-zero. Currently, find just converts the non-zero -exec call into a boolean state to be used as part of a find expression.

$ find . -maxdepth 2 -type f \( -exec chmod a+x {} \; -o \( -printf "FAIL\n" -a -quit \) \)

This currently will never return non-zero if the chmod fails. I want to be able to return non-zero if the chmod fails, as well as exit early, which it already does using -quit.

Answer 1

If you always want to return a non-zero exit code, use && false as shown below:

find . -maxdepth 2 -type f ...  && false

---

Use grep to look for the the special FAIL string printed by find. It will return zero if the exec failed, non-zero otherwise.

$ find . -maxdepth 2 -type f \( -exec chmod a+x {} \; -o \( -printf "FAIL\n" -a -quit \) \) | grep -q "FAIL"

Answer 2

find has the "plus" version of the -exec command. These actually exit with non-zero status, if one or more invocations of the command fail. So:

find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -exec false "{}" "+"

will give you the desired "fail" exit status. But it will execute your command (here false) only once, with all files found listed as arguments. So you need to use a command, that can handle a list of files, and that will exit a non-zero status, if processing any of the provided files failed.