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Check if a file exists with wildcard in shell script

发布于 2011-06-15 19:50:26

I'm trying to check if a file exists, but with a wildcard. Here is my example:

if [ -f "xorg-x11-fonts*" ]; then
    printf "BLAH"
fi

I have also tried it without the double quotes.

Questioner
Danny
Viewed
0
18.5k 2020-10-15 06:13:47

Update: For bash scripts, the most direct and performant approach is:

if compgen -G "${PROJECT_DIR}/*.png" > /dev/null; then
    echo "pattern exists!"
fi

This will work very speedily even in directories with millions of files and does not involve a new subshell.

Source


The simplest should be to rely on ls return value (it returns non-zero when the files do not exist):

if ls /path/to/your/files* 1> /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "files do exist"
else
    echo "files do not exist"
fi

I redirected the ls output to make it completely silent.


EDIT: Since this answer has got a bit of attention (and very useful critic remarks as comments), here is an optimization that also relies on glob expansion, but avoids the use of ls:

for f in /path/to/your/files*; do

    ## Check if the glob gets expanded to existing files.
    ## If not, f here will be exactly the pattern above
    ## and the exists test will evaluate to false.
    [ -e "$f" ] && echo "files do exist" || echo "files do not exist"

    ## This is all we needed to know, so we can break after the first iteration
    break
done

This is very similar to @grok12's answer, but it avoids the unnecessary iteration through the whole list.