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

Question

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?

you might have to use find -print0 2> /dev/null | xargs -0 instead of find -exec — Fravadona
– Fravadona, Commented Apr 29, 2022 at 6:54

Dudi Boy · Accepted Answer · 2022-04-30 19:30:07Z

1

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

answered Apr 30, 2022 at 19:30

Dudi Boy

1

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Léa Gris Over a year ago

maybe xargs -0, but this is still different from find -exec and even more from find -execdir as the command will be executed even when nothing has been found.

Fravadona · Accepted Answer · 2022-05-06 16:56:19Z

1

If for some reason you can't use:

find . -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 ...

Then here's a POSIX way to do the same thing:

find . -exec sh -c '"$0" "$@" 2>&3' ... {} + 3>&2 2>/dev/null

^{note: 3>&2 is located before 2>/dev/null}

answered May 6, 2022 at 16:56

Fravadona

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