Use test to check for condition with find and execdir option

Question

I think I can keep my question short. Why does the following command produce no output?

find /usr/share/themes -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -execdir test -d {}/gnome-shell \;

I expected it to print all folders in /usr/share/themes that contain a folder gnome-shell. Several websites suggest that this usage of test as a command in exec/execdir is possible.

From man find:

-exec command ;
              Execute  command;  true  if 0 status is returned. [...]

Answer 1

–exec and –execdir evaluate to true if the named program returns a 0 value as its exit status.

This means that, if you were to say something like –execdir test -d {}/gnome-shell \; –print or –exec … \; –something, the thing after the –exec would be processed if and only if the test command returned true.  As an extreme example, you could even say

find starting_dir … –execdir test –d {}/gnome-shell \; –exec rm –rf {} \;

although that’s not necessarily the best way to do that.

Answer 2

test does not output anything, it just returns the exit status.

However, if you are only testing in depth 1, you can avoid find completely:

ls -d /usr/share/themes/*/gnome-shell