How to check if find command didn't find anything?

Question

I know that is possible to use for loop with find command like that

for i in `find $something`; do (...) done 

but I want to use find command with "if".

I am trying to create progress comments (and log files later) about removed files by my script. I need to check if

find /directory/whatever -name '*.tar.gz' -mtime +$DAYS 

found something or not. If not I want to say echo 'You don't have files older than $DAYS days' or something like this ;)

How I can do that in shell script?

Answer 1

Count the number of lines output and store it in a variable, then test it:

lines=$(find ... | wc -l) if [ $lines -eq 0 ]; then ... fi 

Answer 2

You want to use find command inside an if condition , you can try this one liner :

 [[ ! -z `find 'YOUR_DIR/' -name 'something'` ]] && echo "found" || echo "not found" 

example of use :

 [prompt] $ mkdir -p Dir/dir1 Dir/dir2/ Dir/dir3                   [prompt] $ ls Dir/  dir1  dir2  dir3  [prompt] $ [[ ! -z `find 'Dir/' -name 'something'` ]] && echo "found" || echo "not found"  not found  [prompt] $ touch Dir/dir3/something  [prompt] $ [[ ! -z `find 'Dir/' -name 'something'` ]] && echo "found" || echo "not found"  found