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bashfindexecstderr

find -exec - suppress errors only for find, but not for executed command

When running the find command, it may output "No such file or directory" errors.

As answered to the find - suppress "No such file or directory" errors question here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/45575053/7939871, redirecting file descriptor 2 to /dev/null will happily silences error messages from find, such as No such file or directory:

find yada-yada... 2>/dev/null

This is perfectly fine, as long as not using -exec to execute a command. Because 2>/dev/null will also silence errors from the executed command.

As an example:

$ find /root -exec sh -c 'echo "Error" >&2' {} \; 2>/dev/null
$ find /root -exec sh -c 'echo "Error" >&2' {} \;
Error
find: ‘/root’: Permission denied

Is there a way to silence errors from find while preserving errors from the executed command?

Solution

  • Using -exec option in find command is integration of xargs command into find command.

    You can alwayes separate find from -exec by piping find output into xargs command.

    For example:

     find / -type f -name "*.yaml" -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs  ls -l