How to check if the file exists in directory?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi Gurus,

I have a requests to find if all the file in the filelist exist in certain directory.
example:
my filelist

abc
def
ddd
cde
afg

how can I find these 5 files exists at director /home/abc

Thanks in advance

2

Is this homework? If not, what have you tried so far?

3

No, it is not a homework.

I tried list the file then send to tmp file, then using diff to compare. but it doesn't work
ls > tmp
diff tmp filelist

4

You could use a while loop to read the file names from the file: filelist and check each one in the dir: /home/abc

while read file
do
        [ -e "/home/abc/${file}" ] && echo "File: $file does exists" || echo "File: $file does not exists"
done < filelist
1 Like
5 
#!/bin/ksh
d='/home/abc'
fileList='./filelist'
while read file
do
if [ -f "${d}/${file}" ]; then
   echo "${file} exists"
else
   echo "${file} does not exist"
fi
done < "${fileList}"
1 Like
6 
$ ls -1 /home/abc |grep -wf filelist
ddd
1 Like
7

Those grep options cannot cope with whitespace nor characters that are special in BRE grammar (most notably, the dot). Instead of -w, I would suggest -xF.

Minor nit: -1 is redundant.

Regards,
Alister

1 Like
8

The most math-like tool for this is comm, where you supply two sorted lists and it tells you who is in a only, who in b only, and who in both, but you can option to just get 1 or 2 columns, e.g., comm -23 for just a only items. The output has leading tabs, one for b only and two for both, unless you eliminate columns.

comm -3 <( cd /home/abc ; export LC_ALL=C ; ls | sort ) <( export LC_ALL=C ; sort filelist )
1 Like