bash: check if file exists(without using if)

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

basically im trying to make this work in a bash shell script without using if statements

if [ -f testfile ]
 then
 echo testfile exists!
 fi

what it does is check if the file exists or not

i have this line but its not working, it checks if the testfile exists if it doesnt it 2> to the dev null pathname and i have an echo statement which says it doesnt exist

2

Perhaps you could have posted the line that didn't work, then.

If you don't want to use 'if', your options are limited.

[ -f testfile ] || exit 1
3

im trying the

[ -f testfile ] || exit 1

with an echo statement "Exits since testfile doesnt exist"

i have another one

[ -f testfile2 ] || exit 1

with an echo statement "testfile 2" exist

can't figure out how to show testfile echo statement or the testfile2 echo statement

4

Usually, you don't.

You could do something like [ -f file ] || echo "doesn't exist" && exit 1 but what if the echo fails for some reason? Then you won't exit.

You could combine statements like [ -f file ] || ( statement1 ; statement2 ) except that, because it's in a subshell, exit won't quit your main shell, just the part in brackets!

Since you're in BASH though, you can do this:

function die
{
        echo "$@" >&2
        exit 1
}

[ -f file ] || die "File does not exist"

---------- Post updated at 09:32 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:29 AM ----------

If you have a bunch of them, you can do

function die
{
        echo "$@" >&2
        exit 1
}

for FILE in "file1" "file2" "file3" "file4" "file5" "file6"
do
        [ -f "$FILE" ] || die "$FILE does not exist"
done