I am trying to write a script using if statements but I am unclear as to what some linux commands return. for instance could I use the "find" command as the condition for an if statement as shown below?

(I want this to determine if the file exists and if it does then execute commands on the file)

does the find command return true if it finds the file and false if it doesn't?
I am wondering the same thing about the grep command. I read the man pages and it says "find" returns a 0 if all files are processed succesfully and other numbers if not. Does that mean it will return a 0 if it finds the file? or does that just mean it returns a 0 if the "find" command runs succesfully without running into problems?

The program you show returns the text output from find inside the [].

The grep answer is you get 0,1 or 2. You can actually test this faster than posting the question here.

1 members found this post helpful.

Immediately after a command exits, its exit code is stored in the special variable "$?". echo that to see what you'll get, or test it in the usual ways.

But actually you generally don't need to use any kind of test here. The [..] test brackets are just a command like any other, and give an exit code, which is what the if/while/until constructs are actually working with. So you can replace it with just about any command if you want.

find, however, doesn't appear to give you the kind of exit code you want. It only gives a non-zero status if there are errors in the command. So for that you have to do something like capture the output in a variable/array and test that for the existence of a string.

Or actually, the way you have it written in the OP may do just as well, since the $(...) will be substituted with the text output of the command. [..] will exit successfully if it finds a text string (although it's better to use the explicit -n/-z test options). The only caveat is that you have to double quote the substitution or else it will probably error out on multi-word strings (too many arguments).

The bash/ksh [[..]] extended test doesn't have that problem, by the way, and so is recommended.

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/031

1 members found this post helpful.

May I also suggest that if you are looking for a file, then just test for it:

1 members found this post helpful.