Check if a file exists with wildcard in shell script

Question

I m trying to check if a file exists  but with a wildcard  Here is my example   if   -f  xorg-x11-fonts      then     printf  BLAH  fi   I have also tried it without the double quotes

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You can do the following   set -- xorg-x11-fonts  if   -f   1     then     printf  BLAH  fi   This works with sh and derivates  ksh and bash  It doesn t create any sub-shell        and       commands used in other solutions create a sub-shell   they fork a process  and they are inefficient  Of course it works with several files  and this solution can be the fastest  or second to the fastest one   It works too when there s no matches  There isn t need to use nullglob as one of the commentators say    1 will contain the origintal test name  therefore the test -f  1 won t success  because the  1 file doesn t exist

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Update  For bash scripts  the most direct and performant approach is  if compgen -G  quot   PROJECT DIR    png quot   gt   dev null  then     echo  quot pattern exists  quot  fi  This will work very speedily even in directories with millions of files and does not involve a new subshell  Source  The simplest should be to rely on ls return value  it returns non-zero when the files do not exist   if ls  path to your files  1 gt   dev null 2 gt  amp 1  then     echo  quot files do exist quot  else     echo  quot files do not exist quot  fi  I redirected the ls output to make it completely silent   EDIT  Since this answer has got a bit of attention  and very useful critic remarks as comments   here is an optimization that also relies on glob expansion  but avoids the use of ls  for f in  path to your files   do         Check if the glob gets expanded to existing files         If not  f here will be exactly the pattern above        and the exists test will evaluate to false        -e  quot  f quot     amp  amp  echo  quot files do exist quot     echo  quot files do not exist quot          This is all we needed to know  so we can break after the first iteration     break done  This is very similar to  grok12 s answer  but it avoids the unnecessary iteration through the whole list

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Here is my answer -   files  xorg-x11-fonts    if   -e    files 0       then     printf  BLAH  fi

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How about   if ls -l    grep -q  xorg-x11-fonts      grep needs a regex  not a shell glob then        do something else        do something else fi

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The bash code I use  if ls  syslog   log  gt   dev null 2 gt  amp 1  then     echo  Log files are present in  syslog    fi   Thanks

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UPDATE   Okay  now I definitely have the solution   files   ls xorg-x11-fonts  2 gt   dev null   wc -l  if     files      0    then    echo  Exists  else     echo  None found   fi   gt  Exists

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if    ls path1   path2   2 gt   dev null   wc -l  -ne 0    then echo ok  else echo no  fi

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Using new fancy shmancy features in ksh  bash  and zsh shells  this example doesn t handle spaces in filenames      Declare a regular array  -A will declare an associative array  Kewl   declare -a myarray    mydir tmp  txt   array length    myarray        Not found if the 1st element of the array is the unexpanded string    ie  if it contains a      if      myarray 0               then    echo  No files not found  elif    array length -eq 1     then    echo  File was found  else    echo  Files were found  fi  for myfile in   myarray     do   echo   myfile  done   Yes  this does smell like Perl   Glad I didn t step in it

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man test   if   -e file    then       fi   will work for dir file   regards

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You can also cut other files out  if   -e    echo  1   cut -d    -f1       then        fi

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Found a couple of neat solutions worth sharing  The first still suffers from  this will break if there s too many matches  problem   pat  yourpattern   matches   pat         matches       pat      amp  amp  echo  found     Recall that if you use an array without the     syntax  you get the first element of the array    If you have  shopt -s nullglob  in your script  you could simply do   matches  yourpattern          matches      amp  amp  echo  found    Now  if it s possible to have a ton of files in a directory  you re pretty well much stuck with using find   find  path to dir -maxdepth 1 -type f -name  yourpattern     grep -q      amp  amp  echo  found

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IMHO it s better to use find always when testing for files  globs or directories  The stumbling block in doing so is find s exit status  0 if all paths were traversed successfully   0 otherwise  The expression you passed to find creates no echo in its exit code   The following example tests if a directory has entries     mkdir A   touch A b   find A -maxdepth 0 -not -empty -print   head -n1   grep -q    amp  amp  echo  not empty  not empty   When A has no files grep fails     rm A b   find A -maxdepth 0 -not -empty -print   head -n1   grep -q      echo  empty  empty   When A does not exist grep fails again because find only prints to stderr     rmdir A   find A -maxdepth 0 -not -empty -print   head -n1   grep -q    amp  amp  echo  not empty     echo  empty  find   A   No such file or directory empty   Replace -not -empty by any other find expression  but be careful if you -exec a command that prints to stdout  You may want to grep for a more specific expression in such cases   This approach works nicely in shell scripts  The originally question was to look for the glob xorg-x11-fonts    if find -maxdepth 0 -name  xorg-x11-fonts   -print   head -n1   grep -q   then       the glob matched else          not fi   Note that the else-branched is reached if xorg-x11-fonts  had not matched  or find encountered an error  To distinguish the case use

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If your shell has a nullglob option and it s turned on  a wildcard pattern that matches no files will be removed from the command line altogether  This will make ls see no pathname arguments  list the contents of the current directory and succeed  which is wrong  GNU stat  which always fails if given no arguments or an argument naming a nonexistent file  would be more robust  Also  the  amp   redirection operator is a bashism   if stat --printf     path to your files  2 gt  dev null then     echo found else     echo not found fi   Better still is GNU find  which can handle a wildcard search internally and exit as soon as at it finds one matching file  rather than waste time processing a potentially huge list of them expanded by the shell  this also avoids the risk that the shell might overflow its command line buffer   if test -n    find  dir to search -maxdepth 1 -name  files   -print -quit   then     echo found else     echo not found fi   Non-GNU versions of find might not have the -maxdepth option used here to make find search only the  dir to search instead of the entire directory tree rooted there

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I use this   filescount  ls xorg-x11-fonts    awk  END   print NR       if    filescount -gt 0    then       blah   fi

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Maybe this will help someone   if     echo xorg-x11-fonts        xorg-x11-fonts      then     printf  BLAH  fi

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If there is a huge amount of files on a network folder using the wildcard is questionable  speed  or command line arguments overflow    I ended up with   if   -n    find somedir that may not exist yet -maxdepth 1 -name    ext -print -quit       then   echo Such file exists fi

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The question wasn t specific to Linux Bash so I thought I would add the Powershell way - which treats wildcards different - you put it in the quotes like so below   If  Test-Path    output test-pdf-docx Text-Book-Part-I       Remove-Item -force -v -path   output test-pdf-docx   pdf   Remove-Item -force -v -path   output test-pdf-docx   docx     I think this is helpful because the concept of the original question covers  shells  in general not just Bash or Linux  and would apply to Powershell users with the same question too

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Here s a solution for your specific problem that doesn t require for loops or external commands like ls  find and the like   if      echo xorg-x11-fonts        xorg-x11-fonts      then     printf  BLAH  fi   As you can see  it s just a tad more complicated than what you were hoping for  and relies on the fact that if the shell is not able to expand the glob  it means no files with that glob exist and echo will output the glob as is  which allows us to do a mere string comparison to check whether any of those files exist at all   If we were to generalize the procedure  though  we should take into account the fact that files might contain spaces within their names and or paths and that the glob char could rightfully expand to nothing  in your example  that would be the case of a file whose name is exactly xorg-x11-fonts    This could be achieved by the following function  in bash    function doesAnyFileExist      local arg         local files   arg          files     -gt 1           files     -eq 1    amp  amp    -e    files 0          Going back to your example  it could be invoked like this    if doesAnyFileExist  xorg-x11-fonts    then     printf  BLAH  fi   Glob expansion should happen within the function itself for it to work properly  that s why I put the argument in quotes and that s what the first line in the function body is there for  so that any multiple arguments  which could be the result of a glob expansion outside the function  as well as a spurious parameter  would be coalesced into one  Another approach could be to raise an error if there s more than one argument  yet another could be to ignore all but the 1st argument   The second line in the function body sets the files var to an array constituted by all the file names that the glob expanded to  one for each array element  It s fine if the file names contain spaces  each array element will contain the names as is  including the spaces    The third line in the function body does two things    It first checks whether there s more than one element in the array  If so  it means the glob surely got expanded to something  due to what we did on the 1st line   which in turn implies that at least one file matching the glob exist  which is all we wanted to know  If at step 1  we discovered that we got less than 2 elements in the array  then we check whether we got one and if so we check whether that one exist  the usual way  We need to do this extra check in order to account for function arguments without glob chars  in which case the array contains only one  unexpanded  element

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Try this  fileTarget  xorg-x11-fonts    filesFound   ls  fileTarget     2014-04-03 edit 2  removed dbl-qts around          edit 2014-04-03  removed dbl-quotes and added test file  Charlie  22 html   2 spaces   case   filesFound  in        printf  NO files found for target   fileTarget  n            printf  FileTarget Files found   filesFound  n     esac    Test  fileTarget    html     where I have some html docs in the current dir  FileTarget Files found Baby21 html baby22 html charlie  22 html charlie21 html charlie22 html charlie23 html  fileTarget  xorg-x11-fonts    NO files found for target xorg-x11-fonts    Note that this only works in the current directory  or where the var fileTarget includes the path you are want to inspect

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Strictly speaking  if you only want to print  Blah  here is the solution    find   -maxdepth 1 -name  xorg-x11-fonts   -printf  BLAH  -quit   Here is another way    doesFirstFileExist        test -e   1     if doesFirstFileExist xorg-x11-fonts  then printf  BLAH  fi   But I think the most optimal is as follow  because it won t try to sort file names    if   -z  find   -maxdepth 1 -name  xorg-x11-fonts   -printf 1 -quit    then printf  BLAH  fi

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for i in xorg-x11-fonts   do   if   -f   i     then printf  BLAH   fi done   This will work with multiple files and with white space in file names

[shell] Check if a file exists with wildcard in shell script

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