How does/should rg handle broken symlink when the --follow option is activated?

[pierre-rouleau]

Hi all!

Ripgrep is so useful! Thanks for it!

One thing is not clear to : is rg supposed to handle broken symlinks when the --follow option is used?

As far as I know it behaves like this, when some symlinks are broken:

• It continues searching.
• It report the broken symlink to stderr.
• It exist with an exit code of 2.

Should it terminate with a non-zero exit code even if it did find some matches?

• Should it not exit with 0 since it found something?
  • The fact that there were some output on stderr might be enough to identify the presence (and nature) of error(s).
• The exit code is 2 on invalid command.
• The exit code is 1 when the search found nothing.

So AFAIK we can't use the exit code to determine if there were any finding. rg might find a lot of files matching the criteria yet exit with 2 because it encountered broken symlinks or (I assume) was forbidden access to some directory or file.

I looked at the man page and can't find a clear description of the behaviour to expect. I might have missed it.

[BurntSushi]

So AFAIK we can't use the exit code to determine if there were any finding.

That is exactly correct and the intended outcome. The point is that an error occurring might result in missing a possible match you otherwise expected to find. If you don't want broken symlinks to impact the exit code, then you should filter them out before feeding it to ripgrep. Maybe via some find incantation (which I don't know off the top of my head). Or, if you just care about the presence of a match or not, you can use -q/--quiet to get a 0 or 1 exit code regardless of file system error.

This behavior comes from GNU grep.

I looked at the man page and can't find a clear description of the behaviour to expect.

I feel like the EXIT STATUS section in the man page is pretty clear on this point (and it gives you the -q/--quiet work-around):

EXIT STATUS
       If ripgrep finds a match, then the exit status of the program is
       0.  If no match could be found, then the exit status is 1. If an
       error occurred, then the exit status is always 2 unless  ripgrep
       was  run with the -q/--quiet flag and a match was found. In sum‐
       mary:

       •  0 exit status occurs only when at least one match was  found,
          and if no error occurred, unless -q/--quiet was given.

       •  1  exit status occurs only when no match was found and no er‐
          ror occurred.

       •  2 exit status occurs when an error occurred. This is true for
          both catastrophic errors (e.g., a regex syntax error) and for
          soft errors (e.g., unable to read a file).

[pierre-rouleau]

Thanks for the reply. I stand corrected: the man page does describe it fine. I should have read a couple more line... .

It would be nice, however, to be able to use the exit code to distinguish between not finding anything, finding some but having errors caused by file system issues (broken links, access problems), and finding something without any error. Having to filter the broken links (or any OS issues) before launching rg, would take some of the advantages of running rg in the first place.

But it's now unambiguously clear.