Another problem with this is that there are already things which affect find's exit code.   They don't necessarily cause find to exit immediately.   But the non-zero exit value serves to tell the caller that the output of find may have bewn incorrect or incomplete.

Allowing for example "-exit 0" would hide those failures from the caller.   So I am not keen on this idea.

But the comparison with NetBSD is somewhat interesting.   I wonder how frequently the feature is actually used.

Meanwhile though, if you want to be able to do this kind of thing with GNU find as-is, use -fprint -quit and check the file after find has exited.

A very typical use case for find in shell scripting is to check if some files exist, e.g. in an if block:

if find /tmp -name 'some_pattern*' | grep -q .
then
  do_something
fi

Unfortunately find currently doesn't have any way to communicate "some matches" or "no matches" via exit code, necessitating the grep -q workaround, or another workaround like -exec false:

if find /tmp -name 'some_pattern*' -exec false {} +
then
  do_something
fi

There is a -quit operator that exits find immediately, but it doesn't currently support specifying an exit code. It would be useful if it were possible to specify an exit code via -quit N so we could use find like this:

if ! find /tmp -name 'some_pattern*' -quit 1
then
  do_something
fi

Adding support for specifying an exit code has been suggested by berny before, but unfortunately it went unnoticed: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=54730#comment6