Subject: bug#23451: 25.0.93; Clarify the dependency on find/grep for platforms not having those tools

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 28 May 2017 22:58:08 -0400

Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]> writes:

> 4. See the user error about status 1, and the message containing four
> grep hits. Doing this search with Ag confirms the same set of hits
> (with normal exit status).
>
> Could someone please explain why find-grep exits with status 1 here?

I see the same exit status when running find ... -exec grep ... + from
the shell.  It seems that -exec <cmd> + will cause 'find' to exit with
status 1 if the <cmd> exits with status 1:

    ~$ find . -exec false '{}' + ; echo $?
    1
    ~$ find . -exec true '{}' + ; echo $?
    0

So when <cmd> is grep, and the number of files is greater than the
command line length limit, the exit status is effectively random (it
depends on 'find' decides to group the batches of files it passes to
'grep').