Shell Programming and Scripting

No, he's not. (Sorry, pseudocoder ) Well, partially correct. Correct about having to use MYSIZE but incorrect about the exit status.

Note that $? is equal to the exit status of the subshell, which is equal to the last command run in that subshell (tested in bash and ksh):

Code:

$ var=$(false; true; exit 45)value
$ echo Results: \$\?=$? \$var=$var
Results: $?=45 $var=value

After that first statement, the value of $? is the exit status of the last command executed by the subshell, find, and not that of the variable assignment. The problem is that the original poster's code is improperly interpreting the exit status of find. find will return 0 whether or not it finds anything, as long as no error occurred. The echo error branch is always running because no errors are occurring and the exit status is always 0.

Instead of...

Code:

if [ $? -eq 1 ]

... use ...

Code:

if [ ! "$MYSIZE" ]

... or, if you flip the then and else clauses, simply ...

Code:

if [ "$MYSIZE" ]

Regards,
Alister

You are correct Alister
interesting confusing thread