File existence check

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hi
i wanted to check if the file exist or not(multiple files)

DIRE=/home/V478

if [ -f "${DIRE}"/abc.* ];
then
echo "file present"
else
echo "file not present"
fi

But i am getting the error as

: [: unexpected operator/operand

2

The syntax will not do.

 if [ -f "${DIRE}"/abc.* ];

Will expand to

if [ -f /home/V478/abc.one /home/V478/abc.two /home/V478/abc.three ]

Before the test occurs if these files exist in /home/V478

3

What shell? bash has some nifty features which make this easier. Since you're using [ for tests, I'll assume sh.

You cannot have multiple arguments in test. You need to loop over them, even if you only care about one.

for f in "$DIRE"/abc.*; do
  if [ -f "$f" ]; then
    echo "some files exist"
  else
    echo "globbing failed."
  fi
  break
fi

in bash we can use some options so that globbing abc.* returns nothing if the files don't exist. using this and an array, we can simply count the elements returned:

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s nullglob
files=( "$DIR"/abc.* );
shopt -u nullglob # or keep it set..whatever.
if (( ${#files[@]} > 0 )); then
  echo "files are present"
else
  echo "file not present"
fi
4

See my file_exists tip

if file_exists "${DIRE}"/abc.*
then
  echo "file present"
else
  echo "file not present"
fi