Is it possible to automatically set all products with a price = 0 to be out of stock?

Question

We are trying to figure out if there is a Magento setting or another way of making sure that any products on our e-commerce site that are uploaded with a price of 0 are set to out of stock, so then they will not be visible on the front end

I have already found the setting that Sets out of stock products to be disabled,

So I'm trying to figure out how to make all products with price = 0, set to out of stock

Answer 1

Only way could think of doing this is by cron which would look something like this. hope this helps

public function setOutOfStock()
{
    $collection = Mage::getResourceModel('cataloginventory/stock_item_collection');
    $collection->addFieldToFilter('qty', array('eq' => 0));

    foreach($collection as $item) {
        $item->setData('is_in_stock', 0);
    }
    $collection->save();
}

Answer 2

Why not just set stock quantity to 0 and disable backorders? Products with 0 stock will be automatically be set to Out of Stock by Magento (at least in Magento 2, I'm sure it's the same in 1)