Test if there are files matching a pattern in order to execute a script

Question

I am trying to write an if statement to test whether there are any files matching a certain pattern. If there is a text file in a directory it should run a given script.

My code currently:

if [ -f /*.txt ]; then ./script fi

Please give some ideas; I only want to run the script if there is a .txt in the directory.

Answer 1

[ -f /*.txt ]

would return true only if there's one (and only one) non-hidden file in / whose name ends in .txt and if that file is a regular file or a symlink to a regular file.

That's because wildcards are expanded by the shell prior to being passed to the command (here [).

So if there's a /a.txt and /b.txt, [ will be passed 5 arguments: [, -f, /a.txt, /b.txt and ]. [ would then complain that -f is given too many arguments.

If you want to check that the *.txt pattern expands to at least one non-hidden file (regular or not), in the bash shell:

shopt -s nullglob
set -- *.txt
if [ "$#" -gt 0 ]; then
  ./script "$@" # call script with that list of files.
fi
# Or with bash arrays so you can keep the arguments:
files=( *.txt )
# apply C-style boolean on member count
(( ${#files[@]} )) && ./script "${files[@]}"

shopt -s nullglob is bash specific (shopt is, nullglob actually comes from zsh), but shells like ksh93, zsh, yash, tcsh have equivalent statements.

With zsh, the test for are there files matching a pattern can be written using an anonymous function and the N (for nullglob) and Y1 (to stop after the first find) glob qualifier:

if ()(($#)) *.txt(NY1); then
  do-something
fi

Note that those find those files by reading the contents of the directory, it doesn't try and access those files at all which makes it more efficient than solutions that call commands like ls or stat on that list of files computed by the shell.

The standard sh equivalent would be:

set -- [*].txt *.txt
case "$1$2" in
  ('[*].txt*.txt') ;;
  (*) shift; script "$@"
esac

The problem is that with Bourne or POSIX shells, if a pattern doesn't match, it expands to itself. So if *.txt expands to *.txt, you don't know whether it's because there's no .txt file in the directory or because there's one file called *.txt. Using [*].txt *.txt allows to discriminate between the two.

Now, if you want to check that the *.txt matches at least one regular file or symlink to regular file (like your [ -f *.txt ] suggests you want to do), or that all the files that match *.txt are regular files (after symlink resolution), that's yet another matter.

With zsh:

if ()(($#)) *.txt(NY1-.); then
  echo "there is at least one regular .txt file"
fi
if ()(($#)) *.txt(NY1^-.); then
  echo "there is at least one non-regular .txt files"
fi

(remove the - if you want to do the test prior to symlink resolution, that is consider symlinks as non-regular files whether they point to regular files or not).

Answer 2

You could always use find:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*.txt" 2>/dev/null | grep -q . && ./script

Explanation:

• find . : search the current directory
• -maxdepth 1: do not search subdirectories
• -type f : search only regular files
• name "*.txt" : search for files ending in .txt
• 2>/dev/null : redirect error messages to /dev/null
• | grep -q . : grep for any character, will return false if no characters found.
• && ./script : Execute ./script only if the previous command was successful (&&)

Answer 3

A possible solution is also Bash builtin compgen. That command returns all possible matches for a globbing pattern and has an exit code indicating whether any files matched.

compgen -G "/*.text" > /dev/null && ./script

I found this question while looking for solutions that are faster though.

Answer 4

Here's a one liner to do it:

$ ls
file1.pl  file2.pl

files exist

$ stat -t *.pl >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "file exists" || echo "file doesn't exist"
file exists

files don't exist

$ stat -t -- *.txt >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "file exists" || echo "file don't exist"
file don't exist

This approach makes use of the || and && operators in bash. These are the "or" and "and" operators.

So if the stat command returns a $? equal to 0 then the first echo is called, if it returns a 1, then the second echo is called.

return results from stat

# a failure
$ stat -t -- *.txt >/dev/null 2>&1
$ echo "$?"
1

# a success
$ stat -t -- *.pl >/dev/null 2>&1
$ echo "$?"
0

This question is extensively covered over on stackoverflow:

• Test whether a glob has any matches in bash

Answer 5

As Chazelas points out, your script would fail if wildcard expansion matches more than one file.

However, there is a trick I use (even I don't like it very much) to get around:

PATTERN=(/*.txt)
if [ -f ${PATTERN[0]} ]; then
...
fi

How it works?

Wildcard expansion will match an array of filenames, we get the first one if there are some, otherwise null if no match.

Answer 6

I find this approach pretty simple and readable in bash, without invoking too many magic bashisms:

if [[ $(ls /*.txt 2>/dev/null) != "" ]]; then ./script; fi

Answer 7

Simple as:

cnt=`ls \*.txt 2>/dev/null | wc -l`
if [ "$cnt" != "0" ]; then ./script fi

wc -l counts the lines in the expanded wildcard.

Answer 8

I like the previous array solution, but that could become wasteful with large numbers of files - the shell would use a great deal of memory to build the array, and only the first element would ever be tested.

Here is an alternate structure that I tested yesterday:

$ cd /etc; if [[ $(echo * | grep passwd) ]];then echo yes;else echo no;fi yes $ cd /etc; if [[ $(echo * | grep password) ]];then echo yes;else echo no;fi no

The exit value from the grep appears to be determining the path through the control structure. This also tests with regular expressions rather than shell patterns. Some of my systems have the "pcregrep" command which allows much more sophisticated regex matches.

(I did edit this answer to remove an "ls" in the command substitution after reading the above criticism for parsing it.)

Answer 9

A more versatile method is:

IFS=
shopt -s nullglob
txt=('/'*'.txt')
if [ -f "$txt" ]; then ./script fi

But this method works only if there is a single match.

Answer 10

You can simply use ls command and properties of " and () symbol:

if [ "$( ls *the folder you want to check* | grep *any pattern* )" != "" ]; then
    : *do anything you like*
fi

Answer 11

I would use a simple case statement within a for loop.
Given this list of files:

a1.txt
a2.jpg
y4.txt
z5.doc

Then execute my_script only against files with txt extension:

for file in * ; do
    case "${file}" in
        *.txt) ./my_script "${file}"
        ;;
    esac
done

Answer 12

A way, in bash: if you want to know if there's some files matching the pattern *.txt, then consider:

(
    shopt -s nullglob
    compgen -W *.txt &>/dev/null

    case $? in
        0) echo 'one match' ;;
        1) echo 'more than one match' ;;
        3) echo 'no match at all' ;;
    esac
)

The subshell ( ) is here only to reset shopt as default settings. Can use

shopt -u nullglob 

too.

Note

It's different than compgen -G, because here we can discriminates more cases

Answer 13

if you want to use an if clause, evaluate the count:

if (( `ls *.txt 2> /dev/null|wc -l` ));then...