Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

i need to check for a files existence in a directory, if any of them exist then do the work....
the following will ilustrate better

directory contains files: positive.1, positive.2,positive.3

CODE
-----------
POSITIVE_FILE=positive

if [ -f $POSITIVE_FILE* ]
then

do the work

fi


that code was working on Unix AT&T but it's not work on REDHAT
please advise

thanx in advance

First, try using the -e option instead..

Click this link and go to the bottom of the page for more info.

If that doesn't work, then maybe the test is actually evaluating to false.. double-check the files exist.. maybe just test for one file in particular at first..

yes it's worked for one file ..... but if there r more it will not work.
unix AT&T doesn't have this prob

regards

I'd create a for loop then:

for file in `ls your/dir/positive.*`
do
stuff to do to $file
done

omran, on ATT unix and on redhat, do the command "man test" and look at the -f option. You will see that both systems specify a single filename. So on both systems you can try this:

mkdir testtest
cd testtest
touch file1 file2
[ -f file1 ] && echo true

and this will work fine. But you are breaking the rules. You are feeding the -f several filenames. Something like this:

[ -f file1 file2 ] && echo true

Illegal code often does different things on different systems. That is why we strive to always write legal code.

Redhat is giving you an error message. ATT is ignoring the extra filenames and only checking if the first exists. I think redhat's behavior is superior. It has brought the problem to your attention.

I know that the ATT system seems to work well in this case. Because you used a wildcard, you are getting away with it. In your case checking only the first file is enough. But it is not behaving the way you think.

[ -f file1 file2 ] && echo true
[ -f file1 xyzzy ] && echo true

will both result in true on ATT. And they will both result in an error message on redhat.

I guess that I would do:
count=`ls file* 2>/dev/null | wc -l`
if [ $count -gt 0 ]

This is compatible with the bourne shell on ATT and with bash's bourne shell emulation on redhat.

But if you need to do something to each file, the loop that oombera mentioned may be the way to go.

Thanx both... that was really useful.

only to complete this
i made something like this

ls $POSITIVE* 2>/dev/null
if [ $? = 0 ]
then
//code
else
//code
fi

thanx again