Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am trying to check the existence of a file, from a list of possible filenames:

status-A
status-B
status-C

before retrieving the last modified datetime using ls, I want to check it exists or ls will throw an error.

So I have tried this:

Code:

if [ -e status-* ]; then
  ls status-*
fi

But the if statement doesn't seem to accept the asterisk as a wild card. Is there a better way of doing this?

Thanks,
Stephen

Use a loop like:

Code:

for file in status-*
do
  if [ -e "$file" ]; then
    # file exists
  else
    # file doesn't exist
  fi
done

Thanks, works a treat. I couldn't understand how it worked until I tried this on the command line:

Code:

echo status-*

and got the filenames of my three test files:
status-1 status-2 status-3

So echo can work a little like ls? I have learnt something today.

status-* is expanded by the shell to the files in the current directory and echo shows the expanded files.

Without the echo command the shell tries to execute the filenames and gives an error.