I would like some help in finding a way to check if files matching a certain regex exist in a directory. Currently, I am using the following method, but it will return an error in certain cases:
ls srv_*.log
The above command will result in ls: cannot access srv_*.log: No such file or directory if there are no files in the directory matching the regex.
The regex I am trying to match is "srv_*.log"
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks.
PrivateTmp are easier to find in a script than I thought… I wanted to find where my files went that I created in /tmp using PHP and can easily find them with for dirname in `find /tmp -type d -name "systemd-private-*-apache2.service-*" `; do nemo "admin://$dirname/tmp" done…srv_*.log is not a regex but a glob matcher.
You can just capture the output and redirect stderr to /dev/null:
FILES_LIST="$(ls srv_*.log 2>/dev/null)"
for file in $FILES_LIST; do
#something with $file
done
And you could even do without FILES_LIST here.
ls for this purpose in bash. And actually it will not work if you happen to have files with spaces in them.
ls puts its result to stdout by default, and it outputs only errors to stderr. If you do A=$(ls nonexistingfile); echo $A you will see that the echo returns nothing, whether you add 2>/dev/null to the substitution or not.From bash manpage:
If the nullglob option is set, and no matches are found, the word is removed. If the failglob shell option is set, and no matches are found, an error message is printed and the command is not executed.
meaning you may want to
shopt -s nullglob
Assuming you are in the good directory, you can do :
shopt -s nullglob
set -- srv_*.log
if [ $# -gt 0 ]
then
#do your stuff
fi
$# contains the number of matching files
Bash has a built-in command for that:
compgen -G [GLOB]
