findutils: Ignore permission denied but Exit Status still 1

English Applications
#1

I want to do a find for files and ignore permission denied.

My basic command is:
find . -type f -name “*ext”
echo $?

I can get rid of the error message by adding:
find . -type f -name “*ext” 2>/dev/null
echo $?

But, the Exit Status is 1, and not 0, which complicates automation.

If I plug this into a script in a for loop, I make it a habit to check the exit status before proceeding. I’ve played around with various find options, but have not been successful in getting find to ignore permission denied. I want the command to be pretty generic. I did try putting in a user and group which shouldn’t have matched, played with ands and or’s and complex stmts, but find still returned with an exit status of 1. I don’t want to use sudo.

Any suggestions.

Thank you.

#2

If you want to always return true status, you could do something like this:

find . -type f -name "*ext" 2>/dev/null || true