Test whether a glob has any matches in bash

Question

If I want to check for the existence of a single file, I can test for it using test -e filename or [ -e filename ].

Supposing I have a glob

Answer 1

(ls glob* &>/dev/null && echo Files found) || echo No file found

Answer 2

In Bash, you can glob to an array; if the glob didn't match, your array will contain a single entry that doesn't correspond to an existing file:

#!/bin/bash

shellglob='*.sh'

scripts=($shellglob)

if [ -e "${scripts[0]}" ]
then stat "${scripts[@]}"
fi

Note: if you have nullglob set, scripts will be an empty array, and you should test with [ "${scripts[*]}" ] or with [ "${#scripts[*]}" != 0 ] instead. If you're writing a library that must work with or without nullglob, you'll want

if [ "${scripts[*]}" ] && [ -e "${scripts[0]}" ]

An advantage of this approach is that you then have the list of files you want to work with, rather than having to repeat the glob operation.

Answer 3

[ `ls glob* 2>/dev/null | head -n 1` ] && echo true

Answer 4

I like

exists() {
    [ -e "$1" ]
}

if exists glob*; then
    echo found
else
    echo not found
fi

This is both readable and efficient (unless there are a huge number of files).
The main drawback is that it's much more subtle than it looks, and I sometimes feel compelled to add a long comment.
If there's a match, "glob*" is expanded by the shell and all the matches are passed to exists(), which checks the first one and ignores the rest.
If there's no match, "glob*" is passed to exists() and found not to exist there either.

Edit: there may be a false positive, see comment

Answer 5

To simplify The MYYN's answer somewhat, based on his idea:

M=(*py)
if [ -e ${M[0]} ]; then
  echo Found
else
  echo Not Found
fi

Answer 6

This abomination seems to work:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
shopt -s nullglob
if [ "`echo *py`" != "" ]; then
    echo "Glob matched"
else
    echo "Glob did not match"
fi

It probably requires bash, not sh.

This works because the nullglob option causes the glob to evaluate to an empty string if there are no matches. Thus any non-empty output from the echo command indicates that the glob matched something.