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Currently xmllint prints an error and exits with code 10 if the nodeset produced by the XPath expression is empty:

echo '<a/>' | xmllint --xpath /b -
XPath set is empty

This makes error handling difficult in shell scripts (since code 10 is not unique to empty set, and capturing stdout and stderr separately in portable POSIX shell is problematic).

Would you be willing to consider an option to treat empty nodesets as expected (i.e. empty output and exit code 0)? Perhaps --xpath-allow-empty or similar?

Thanks for considering, Kevin