UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Sorry for the dumb question. looking for a way to search for a file and just return me a value of say like 0 or 1. When I use the ls or find command and file name does not exists, the following results will return or display to the screen - "find: cannot access filename: No such file or directory (error 2)"
"ls: filename not found: No such file or directory (error 2)"

Code:

test -e /etc && echo exists
exists

test -f /etc && echo file

echo $?
1

Perhaps something like this?

Code:

if [ -f /path/to/file ]; then echo 1; else echo 0; fi

I figured it out... I'm going to just redirect the error message from the screen to an error file etc.

Code:

ls /etc/filename 2> /dev/null |wc -l

Thanks for the help Yazu and verdepollo!

That's not a very good solution. Try some of the others given to you.

Yeah thanks Corona688 going to use with the "test -e" command instead. thanks again everyone for the help.