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 comma

Answer 1

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