UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Did you try your if statement above? If you did try it, what did it do? If you didn't try it, why not? You said you wanted an echo if the file is there and an echo if there is no matching file. I don't see anything in that if command that would echo anything if no matching file is found.

In post #2 in this thread, the first request I made was: "... please tell us ... what operating system you're using". Without an answer to that question we don't know whether sh on your system is a legacy Bourne shell (traditional sh), a 1988 vintage Korn shell with POSIX extensions (frequently called ksh), bash, dash, zsh, or some other less common shell.

If the if statement above is working, we know that you are not using a traditional Bourne shell.

There are several things wrong with the variable assignment statement above, none of which would complain about non-existent /folder/ABC* with any of the shells that would be installed with the name sh on common UNIX systems, Linux systems, or BSD systems. These problems include, but might not be limited to:
There cannot be any spaces around the =.
A traditional Bourne shell command substitution (which would be accepted by any of the above shells) uses back-quote characters (`) not single-quote ('). (And, unless you are using a traditional Bourne shell, the back-quote method of of performing command substitutions (`command`) is obsolete and should never be used: use the $(command) form of command substitution instead).

When asking for help, please ALWAYS show us the exact diagnostic message produced by the system and the exactly command that you typed into the shell that produced the error message.

With the command:

Code:

FILE = 'ls -ltr /folder/ABC* | tail -n 1'

the error that would be expected on most systems would be something like:

Code:

-sh: FILE: not found

With an incorrectly configured Apple OS X operating system (where the standard utilities are installed in a case-insensitive filesystem) you might get something like:

Code:

=:                                cannot open `=' (No such file or directory)
ls -ltr /folder/ABC* | tail -n 1: cannot open `ls -ltr /folder/ABC* | tail -n 1' (No such file or directory)

because with spaces around the assignment operator, this is an attempt to run the FILE command with the two operands:

Code:

=

and

Code:

ls -ltr /folder/ABC* | tail -n 1

You might also get an error like that on a Cygwin subsystem running on a Windows operating system, but I haven't tried this on Cygwin.