Re: shell game

[Shyamal Prasad <shyamal.prasad@sbcglobal.net>]

    "Drew" == Drew Cohan <drewcohan@drewcohan.com> writes:

    Drew> Hi, Using a bash shell script (/bin/sh), I need to know how
    Drew> to check to see if certain files exist in a directory, as
    Drew> in, "Are there any jpegs in this directory?".  I've tried
    Drew> various things (like using -s, -f with test and a do/for
    Drew> loop) but nothing seems to work right.  The closest I can
    Drew> come is

    Drew> if test `ls /opt/images/*.jpg | wc -l` -gt 0 then ...

    Drew> Unfortunately, this gives me the error message "ls:
    Drew> /opt/images/*.jpg: No such file or directory" when there are
    Drew> no jpegs in /opt/images.

    Drew> So what am I missing here?

Try this instead:

if [ "`find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.jpg' -print`" != "" ]
then 
  # do what you want
fi

The -maxdepth 1 restricts find to the current directory. Take it out
if you want to find anything in subdirectories. If you want to operate
on each file you want to write

for i in `find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.jpg' -print`
do
  # do something with $i
done

Cheers!
Shyamal