find command is not able to find piped file

Question

I have a file named .sock in /var/spool/ dir.

Here is the result of ls -al /var/spool/

drwxr-xr-x.  9 root     root 121 Dec 16 09:55 .
drwxr-xr-x. 19 root     root 267 Dec 14 10:47 ..
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root     root  63 Oct 28  2019 anacron
drwx------.  2 root     root   6 Feb 13  2019 cron
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root     root   6 Dec 14  2017 lpd
drwxrwxr-x.  2 root     mail  22 Dec 14 10:47 mail
prw-r--r--.  1 telegraf root   0 Dec 17 10:04 nethermind.sock
drwxr-xr-x. 16 root     root 201 Jul 29  2019 postfix
drwxr-xr-x.  3 root     root  19 Oct 28  2019 rhsm
drwx------.  2 root     root   6 Sep  6  2018 up2date

You can see the nethermind.sock file is marked as prw-r--r--.

I want to delete this file, so I write this in my script -

NETHERMIND_SOCK="/var/spool/nethermind.sock"
PARITY_SOCK="/var/spool/parity.sock"

if [ -f $NETHERMIND_SOCK ]; then
    rm -f $NETHERMIND_SOCK
elif [ -f $PARITY_SOCK ]; then
    rm -f $PARITY_SOCK
else
    echo ".sock not found"
fi

It always gives .sock not found I tried then to find and delete like -

sudo find / -type f -name "*.sock" -exec rm -f {} +

But it seems that the file is not findable.

If I do sudo find /var/spool/ -type f -name "nethermind.sock", It doesn't return anything.

I am not sure about mark p from here prw-r--r--.

Here is a link actually what p marked means. But find command is not able to find piped file.

Answer 1

As your file isn't a regular file but a pipe you can't use [ -f ...] or -type f. Use [ -p ... ] opr -type p instead:

if [ -p $NETHERMIND_SOCK ]; then
    ....

or

sudo find / -type p -name "*.sock" ...