On Thu, 10 Dec 2009, Marc Herbert wrote: > Does anyone know a more elegant way to check for file existence? > Something that does not fork a subshell. And is also more readable > maybe. And is obviously not much longer. > > empty_dir() > { > test "x$(echo $1/*$2)" = "x$1"'/*'"$2" > } > > > Warning: I find neither "noglob" nor "ls" elegant, sorry!
is_file() { for f do [ -f "$f" ] && return done return 1 } is_file /path/to/dir/* || echo empty -- Chris F.A. Johnson, webmaster <http://woodbine-gerrard.com> =================================================================== Author: Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress) Pro Bash Programming: Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell (2009, Apress)