Because "&&" is a shell construct and you're giving it to test as an argument.
I realize that && is a shell construct. As I mentioned in the original post, if I key in : test -e ../two/./x.java && diff ./x.java ../two/./x.java at a command prompt, everything works as expected. The shell separates the test from the diff and only executes the diff if the test is true.
My question is why when find submits the same string to the shell that it comes out with an error.
Sorry, it's late at night and I'm not doing too well with the explanation. When you type
test -e ../two/./x.java && diff ./x.java ../two/./x.java
The shell splits this into tokens. Some tokens have special meaning, in this case "&&" separates two commands. This much you know. However, when you do
find ... -exec test -e ../"$2"/{} '&&' diff {} ../"$2"/{} ';'
find is contstructing a program argument list. It basically does this:
execlp("test", "test", "-e", "../two/x.java", "&&" "diff" "x.java" "../two/x.java", NULL);
What you have here is an invocation of the "test" program (the one in /usr/bin, not the one built into the shell, the shell isn't involved here at all). If you want shell semantics then you need to do
find ... exec sh -c "test -e ../$2/{} && diff {} ../$2/{}" ';'
In this case, find constructs a program with three arguments, like this:
execlp("sh", "sh", "-c" "test -e ../two.java && diff x.java ../two/x.java", NULL);
As I said, I don't do that -- diff or cmp are quite capable of failing when a file doesn't exist and also the "{}" syntax never seems to work properly for me ... but that was years ago when I gave up on it and build commands up a different way.
jch
jch
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