from the desk of stinkpot

test file existence in bash

February 12th, 2007 by Lawrence David

file existence can be tested for in a conditional using the -a operator:

if [ -a filename.txt ]

then

echo “file here!”

fi

Posted in Shell Scripting | 1 Comment »

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One Response to “test file existence in bash”

1. on 16 Jul 2012 at 6:45 am   Rob Stewart

   There’s a problem with what you posted, and I have a couple of suggestions.

   First, the problem is that -a is the logical AND operator for test. What you actually want is -e, which tests for existence. You might also want to know whether the file is readable, for example, so you can use -r instead, though -r fails for both no file and unreadable file. Refer to, for example, http://ss64.com/bash/test.html for other tests you can use.

   Second, I like to keep “then” on the first line, so I’d write:

   if [ -e filename ]; then
   echo “found it”
   fi

   Second, when the action is a single line, as shown, you can simplify your example to the following:

   [ -e filename ] && echo “found it”

   There’s also || for logical OR’ing:

   [ -e somefile ] || echo >&2 “somefile missing”