How would you go about telling whether files of a specific extension are present in a directory, with bash?
Something like
if [ -e *.flac ]; then
echo t
shopt -s nullglob
set -- $(echo *.ext)
if [ "${#}" -gt 0 ];then
echo "got file"
fi
This uses ls(1), if no flac files exist, ls reports error and the script exits; othewise the script continues and the files may be be processed
#! /bin/sh
ls *.flac >/dev/null || exit
## Do something with flac files here
Here is a solution using no external commands (i.e. no ls
), but a shell function instead. Tested in bash:
shopt -s nullglob
function have_any() {
[ $# -gt 0 ]
}
if have_any ./*.flac; then
echo true
fi
The function have_any
uses $#
to count its arguments, and [ $# -gt 0 ]
then tests whether there is at least one argument. The use of ./*.flac
instead of just *.flac
in the call to have_any
is to avoid problems caused by files with names like --help
.
You can use -f to check whether files of a specific type exist:
#!/bin/bash
if [ -f *.flac ] ; then
echo true
fi
bash only:
any_with_ext () (
ext="$1"
any=false
shopt -s nullglob
for f in *."$ext"; do
any=true
break
done
echo $any
)
if $( any_with_ext flac ); then
echo "have some flac"
else
echo "dir is flac-free"
fi
I use parentheses instead of braces to ensure a subshell is used (don't want to clobber your current nullglob
setting).
You need to be carful which flag you throw into your if
statement, and how it relates to the outcome you want.
If you want to check for only regular files and not other types of file system entries then you'll want to change your code skeleton to:
if [ -f file ]; then
echo true;
fi
The use of the -f
restricts the if
to regular files, whereas -e
is more expansive and will match all types of filesystem entries. There are of course other options like -d
for directories, etc. See http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/fto.html for a good listing.
As pointed out by @msw, test
(i.e. [
) will choke if you try and feed it more than one argument. This might happen in your case if the glob for *.flac
returned more than one file. In that case try wrapping your if
test in a loop like:
for file in ./*.pdf
do
if [ -f "${file}" ]; then
echo 'true';
break
fi
done
This way you break
on the first instance of the file extension you want and can keep on going with the rest of the script.