How to check if 'ls' outputs something... with a single command?

**TL/DR**: I'm working in Solaris 10. I have a ls ... | egrep ... command, and I need to know if it outputs any results or not. I could just add a | wc -c to the end; but I need the result (0 or non-zero) to be in the exit code, not in the output. And I can't use if, it's not a bash script, I can only execute a single command. --- **Long version**: I'm writing a maintenance process to compress and remove old log files in a Solaris 10 system. It checks all the .log or .xml files inside a given path, takes the ones which were last modified on a given month, creates a .tar with them, and then removes the original files: ls -Egopqt /path/ | egrep -i '2016-10-[0-9] .*(\.log$|\.xml$)' | awk '{ print $7 }' | xargs tar -cvf target.tar And the same to remove the files, just replacing the last part with: | xargs -i rm {} I'm probably overcomplicating it, but **it works. Unless there are no files** for a given month; if that's the case, I get an error saying tar: Missing filenames. How can I check it before attempting to create the tar? I thought of something like this, using wc to check if there is an output or not : ls ... | egrep ... | wc -c Which correctly outputs 0 when there aren't any files, and another number otherwise. The problem is: **I can't see the output, only the exit code** (which is always 0 since there is no error). I'm not doing this in a bash script, I'm working with Siebel CRM: I have a javascript function which generates the commands and executes them with Clib.system calls. The only thing I can see is the exit code: 0 for OK, non-zero for an error (I see the actual number, not "non-zero"). Previously I had a similar requeriment, to check if a *single* file exists or not, and this answer helped me to get to this: [ -f filename ] && exit 111 || exit 0 I'm successfully getting either 111 or 0, depending on if filename exists or not. But I can't get it to work with the ls ... | egrep ... | wc command. I've tried using this syntax : [[ $( ls -Egopq /path/ | egrep -i ... | wc -c ) -ne 0 ]] && exit 111 || exit 0 But I'm getting always exit code 2, it doesn't matter if there are files or not. What am I doing wrong? --- PS: I know I could write a tiny shell script to perform the checks, use a simple if to compare the output, and then return whatever exit code I want. Also, I actually *can* access a command's output, I'd just need to redirect it to a > tempfile and then read it from Siebel. However, I'd prefer to avoid both of these options, as I'm trying to avoid creating unnecessary (temp or permanent) files.