I have made a script that takes all of the files in the current directory, checks if it is a regular file or a folder and sets permissions to them.
My problem is when I encounter hidden files\folders and files\folders that have spaces in the name.
Here is my script:
#!/bin/bash
FILES=$(pwd)/*
for f in $FILES
do
if [ -f $f ]; then chmod u+x $f; fi
if [ -d $f ]; then chmod u=w,g+r,o-rwx $f; fi
done
Here is an example of an error I get from the testing computer:
'test/.bwhajtbzmu xswxcgqsvz' has incorrect permissions: expected 250, got 414.
The other errors are basically the same.
I am not actually sure what is the problem here, if it is the fact that it is a hidden file or that it has a space in the name. I guess both things are the problem.
How can I modify the script so that it can work with hidden files and files that have space in the name ?
Thank you
PS. Please don't question the usefulness of the script, it is a school homework.
Handling whitespace in file names is tricky. First rule is: doublequotes around all usages of variables. Otherwise the shell interprets the spaces as separators. Unfortunately you cannot simply hold a list in a variable. You have to use array variables for this.
#!/bin/bash
FILES=( "$(pwd)"/* )
for f in "${FILES[#]}"
do
if [ -f "$f" ]; then chmod u+x "$f"; fi
if [ -d "$f" ]; then chmod u=w,g+r,o-rwx "$f"; fi
done
For handling hidden files and folders (the ones starting with a dot .) you should best set the shell option dotglob which makes * also match these (which it otherwise doesn't). (Using .* is not good as it matches also . and .. which normally aren't wanted and things like .??* will not match stuff like .a which is normally wanted.):
shopt -s dotglob
FILES=( "$(pwd)"/* )
shopt -u dotglob
I would not recommend leaving it on, so I switch it off after using it.
What command checks if a directory exists or not within a Bash shell script?
To check if a directory exists:
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
echo "$DIRECTORY does exist."
fi
To check if a directory does not exist:
if [ ! -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
echo "$DIRECTORY does not exist."
fi
However, as Jon Ericson points out, subsequent commands may not work as intended if you do not take into account that a symbolic link to a directory will also pass this check.
E.g. running this:
ln -s "$ACTUAL_DIR" "$SYMLINK"
if [ -d "$SYMLINK" ]; then
rmdir "$SYMLINK"
fi
Will produce the error message:
rmdir: failed to remove `symlink': Not a directory
So symbolic links may have to be treated differently, if subsequent commands expect directories:
if [ -d "$LINK_OR_DIR" ]; then
if [ -L "$LINK_OR_DIR" ]; then
# It is a symlink!
# Symbolic link specific commands go here.
rm "$LINK_OR_DIR"
else
# It's a directory!
# Directory command goes here.
rmdir "$LINK_OR_DIR"
fi
fi
Take particular note of the double-quotes used to wrap the variables. The reason for this is explained by 8jean in another answer.
If the variables contain spaces or other unusual characters it will probably cause the script to fail.
Always wrap variables in double quotes when referencing them in a Bash script.
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
# Will enter here if $DIRECTORY exists, even if it contains spaces
fi
Kids these days put spaces and lots of other funny characters in their directory names. (Spaces! Back in my day, we didn't have no fancy spaces!)
One day, one of those kids will run your script with $DIRECTORY set to "My M0viez" and your script will blow up. You don't want that. So use double quotes.
Note the -d test can produce some surprising results:
$ ln -s tmp/ t
$ if [ -d t ]; then rmdir t; fi
rmdir: directory "t": Path component not a directory
File under: "When is a directory not a directory?" The answer: "When it's a symlink to a directory." A slightly more thorough test:
if [ -d t ]; then
if [ -L t ]; then
rm t
else
rmdir t
fi
fi
You can find more information in the Bash manual on Bash conditional expressions and the [ builtin command and the [[ compound commmand.
I find the double-bracket version of test makes writing logic tests more natural:
if [[ -d "${DIRECTORY}" && ! -L "${DIRECTORY}" ]] ; then
echo "It's a bona-fide directory"
fi
Shorter form:
# if $DIR is a directory, then print yes
[ -d "$DIR" ] && echo "Yes"
A simple script to test if a directory or file is present or not:
if [ -d /home/ram/dir ] # For file "if [ -f /home/rama/file ]"
then
echo "dir present"
else
echo "dir not present"
fi
A simple script to check whether the directory is present or not:
mkdir tempdir # If you want to check file use touch instead of mkdir
ret=$?
if [ "$ret" == "0" ]
then
echo "dir present"
else
echo "dir not present"
fi
The above scripts will check if the directory is present or not
$? if the last command is a success it returns "0", else a non-zero value.
Suppose tempdir is already present. Then mkdir tempdir will give an error like below:
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘tempdir’: File exists
To check if a directory exists you can use a simple if structure like this:
if [ -d directory/path to a directory ] ; then
# Things to do
else #if needed #also: elif [new condition]
# Things to do
fi
You can also do it in the negative:
if [ ! -d directory/path to a directory ] ; then
# Things to do when not an existing directory
Note: Be careful. Leave empty spaces on either side of both opening and closing braces.
With the same syntax you can use:
-e: any kind of archive
-f: file
-h: symbolic link
-r: readable file
-w: writable file
-x: executable file
-s: file size greater than zero
You can use test -d (see man test).
-d file True if file exists and is a directory.
For example:
test -d "/etc" && echo Exists || echo Does not exist
Note: The test command is same as conditional expression [ (see: man [), so it's portable across shell scripts.
[ - This is a synonym for the test builtin, but the last argument must, be a literal ], to match the opening [.
For possible options or further help, check:
help [
help test
man test or man [
Or for something completely useless:
[ -d . ] || echo "No"
Here's a very pragmatic idiom:
(cd $dir) || return # Is this a directory,
# and do we have access?
I typically wrap it in a function:
can_use_as_dir() {
(cd ${1:?pathname expected}) || return
}
Or:
assert_dir_access() {
(cd ${1:?pathname expected}) || exit
}
The nice thing about this approach is that I do not have to think of a good error message.
cd will give me a standard one line message to standard error already. It will also give more information than I will be able to provide. By performing the cd inside a subshell ( ... ), the command does not affect the current directory of the caller. If the directory exists, this subshell and the function are just a no-op.
Next is the argument that we pass to cd: ${1:?pathname expected}. This is a more elaborate form of parameter substitution which is explained in more detail below.
Tl;dr: If the string passed into this function is empty, we again exit from the subshell ( ... ) and return from the function with the given error message.
Quoting from the ksh93 man page:
${parameter:?word}
If parameter is set and is non-null then substitute its value;
otherwise, print word and exit from the shell (if not interactive).
If word is omitted then a standard message is printed.
and
If the colon : is omitted from the above expressions, then the
shell only checks whether parameter is set or not.
The phrasing here is peculiar to the shell documentation, as word may refer to any reasonable string, including whitespace.
In this particular case, I know that the standard error message 1: parameter not set is not sufficient, so I zoom in on the type of value that we expect here - the pathname of a directory.
A philosophical note:
The shell is not an object oriented language, so the message says pathname, not directory. At this level, I'd rather keep it simple - the arguments to a function are just strings.
if [ -d "$Directory" -a -w "$Directory" ]
then
#Statements
fi
The above code checks if the directory exists and if it is writable.
More features using find
Check existence of the folder within sub-directories:
found=`find -type d -name "myDirectory"`
if [ -n "$found" ]
then
# The variable 'found' contains the full path where "myDirectory" is.
# It may contain several lines if there are several folders named "myDirectory".
fi
Check existence of one or several folders based on a pattern within the current directory:
found=`find -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "my*"`
if [ -n "$found" ]
then
# The variable 'found' contains the full path where folders "my*" have been found.
fi
Both combinations. In the following example, it checks the existence of the folder in the current directory:
found=`find -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "myDirectory"`
if [ -n "$found" ]
then
# The variable 'found' is not empty => "myDirectory"` exists.
fi
DIRECTORY=/tmp
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
echo "Exists"
fi
Try online
Actually, you should use several tools to get a bulletproof approach:
DIR_PATH=`readlink -f "${the_stuff_you_test}"` # Get rid of symlinks and get abs path
if [[ -d "${DIR_PATH}" ]] ; Then # Now you're testing
echo "It's a dir";
fi
There isn't any need to worry about spaces and special characters as long as you use "${}".
Note that [[]] is not as portable as [], but since most people work with modern versions of Bash (since after all, most people don't even work with command line :-p), the benefit is greater than the trouble.
Have you considered just doing whatever you want to do in the if rather than looking before you leap?
I.e., if you want to check for the existence of a directory before you enter it, try just doing this:
if pushd /path/you/want/to/enter; then
# Commands you want to run in this directory
popd
fi
If the path you give to pushd exists, you'll enter it and it'll exit with 0, which means the then portion of the statement will execute. If it doesn't exist, nothing will happen (other than some output saying the directory doesn't exist, which is probably a helpful side-effect anyways for debugging).
It seems better than this, which requires repeating yourself:
if [ -d /path/you/want/to/enter ]; then
pushd /path/you/want/to/enter
# Commands you want to run in this directory
popd
fi
The same thing works with cd, mv, rm, etc... if you try them on files that don't exist, they'll exit with an error and print a message saying it doesn't exist, and your then block will be skipped. If you try them on files that do exist, the command will execute and exit with a status of 0, allowing your then block to execute.
[[ -d "$DIR" && ! -L "$DIR" ]] && echo "It's a directory and not a symbolic link"
N.B: Quoting variables is a good practice.
Explanation:
-d: check if it's a directory
-L: check if it's a symbolic link
To check more than one directory use this code:
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY1" ] && [ -d "$DIRECTORY2" ] then
# Things to do
fi
Check if the directory exists, else make one:
[ -d "$DIRECTORY" ] || mkdir $DIRECTORY
[ -d ~/Desktop/TEMPORAL/ ] && echo "DIRECTORY EXISTS" || echo "DIRECTORY DOES NOT EXIST"
Using the -e check will check for files and this includes directories.
if [ -e ${FILE_PATH_AND_NAME} ]
then
echo "The file or directory exists."
fi
This answer wrapped up as a shell script
Examples
$ is_dir ~
YES
$ is_dir /tmp
YES
$ is_dir ~/bin
YES
$ mkdir '/tmp/test me'
$ is_dir '/tmp/test me'
YES
$ is_dir /asdf/asdf
NO
# Example of calling it in another script
DIR=~/mydata
if [ $(is_dir $DIR) == "NO" ]
then
echo "Folder doesnt exist: $DIR";
exit;
fi
is_dir
function show_help()
{
IT=$(CAT <<EOF
usage: DIR
output: YES or NO, depending on whether or not the directory exists.
)
echo "$IT"
exit
}
if [ "$1" == "help" ]
then
show_help
fi
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
show_help
fi
DIR=$1
if [ -d $DIR ]; then
echo "YES";
exit;
fi
echo "NO";
As per Jonathan's comment:
If you want to create the directory and it does not exist yet, then the simplest technique is to use mkdir -p which creates the directory — and any missing directories up the path — and does not fail if the directory already exists, so you can do it all at once with:
mkdir -p /some/directory/you/want/to/exist || exit 1
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
# Will enter here if $DIRECTORY exists
fi
This is not completely true...
If you want to go to that directory, you also need to have the execute rights on the directory. Maybe you need to have write rights as well.
Therefore:
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY" ] && [ -x "$DIRECTORY" ] ; then
# ... to go to that directory (even if DIRECTORY is a link)
cd $DIRECTORY
pwd
fi
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY" ] && [ -w "$DIRECTORY" ] ; then
# ... to go to that directory and write something there (even if DIRECTORY is a link)
cd $DIRECTORY
touch foobar
fi
In kind of a ternary form,
[ -d "$directory" ] && echo "exist" || echo "not exist"
And with test:
test -d "$directory" && echo "exist" || echo "not exist"
file="foo"
if [[ -e "$file" ]]; then echo "File Exists"; fi;
The ls command in conjunction with -l (long listing) option returns attributes information about files and directories.
In particular the first character of ls -l output it is usually a d or a - (dash). In case of a d the one listed is a directory for sure.
The following command in just one line will tell you if the given ISDIR variable contains a path to a directory or not:
[[ $(ls -ld "$ISDIR" | cut -c1) == 'd' ]] &&
echo "YES, $ISDIR is a directory." ||
echo "Sorry, $ISDIR is not a directory"
Practical usage:
[claudio#nowhere ~]$ ISDIR="$HOME/Music"
[claudio#nowhere ~]$ ls -ld "$ISDIR"
drwxr-xr-x. 2 claudio claudio 4096 Aug 23 00:02 /home/claudio/Music
[claudio#nowhere ~]$ [[ $(ls -ld "$ISDIR" | cut -c1) == 'd' ]] &&
echo "YES, $ISDIR is a directory." ||
echo "Sorry, $ISDIR is not a directory"
YES, /home/claudio/Music is a directory.
[claudio#nowhere ~]$ touch "empty file.txt"
[claudio#nowhere ~]$ ISDIR="$HOME/empty file.txt"
[claudio#nowhere ~]$ [[ $(ls -ld "$ISDIR" | cut -c1) == 'd' ]] &&
echo "YES, $ISDIR is a directory." ||
echo "Sorry, $ISDIR is not a directoy"
Sorry, /home/claudio/empty file.txt is not a directory
There are great solutions out there, but ultimately every script will fail if you're not in the right directory. So code like this:
if [ -d "$LINK_OR_DIR" ]; then
if [ -L "$LINK_OR_DIR" ]; then
# It is a symlink!
# Symbolic link specific commands go here
rm "$LINK_OR_DIR"
else
# It's a directory!
# Directory command goes here
rmdir "$LINK_OR_DIR"
fi
fi
will execute successfully only if at the moment of execution you're in a directory that has a subdirectory that you happen to check for.
I understand the initial question like this: to verify if a directory exists irrespective of the user's position in the file system. So using the command 'find' might do the trick:
dir=" "
echo "Input directory name to search for:"
read dir
find $HOME -name $dir -type d
This solution is good because it allows the use of wildcards, a useful feature when searching for files/directories. The only problem is that, if the searched directory doesn't exist, the 'find' command will print nothing to standard output (not an elegant solution for my taste) and will have nonetheless a zero exit. Maybe someone could improve on this.
The below find can be used,
find . -type d -name dirname -prune -print
One Liner:
[[ -d $Directory ]] && echo true
(1)
[ -d Piyush_Drv1 ] && echo ""Exists"" || echo "Not Exists"
(2)
[ `find . -type d -name Piyush_Drv1 -print | wc -l` -eq 1 ] && echo Exists || echo "Not Exists"
(3)
[[ -d run_dir && ! -L run_dir ]] && echo Exists || echo "Not Exists"
If an issue is found with one of the approaches provided above:
With the ls command; the cases when a directory does not exists - an error message is shown
[[ `ls -ld SAMPLE_DIR| grep ^d | wc -l` -eq 1 ]] && echo exists || not exists
-ksh: not: not found [No such file or directory]
This question already has answers here:
Meaning of "[: too many arguments" error from if [] (square brackets)
(6 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
I created a script that will check for the existence of .gz files in the base directory and if it finds them it moved them into a new structure based on the current date. The script works perfectly when the shell is set to /bin/bash and I run it manually, but this script is run as a cron job (by logrotate) and I believe that it MUST be run under /bin/sh as I am not sure how to get logrotate to run it under /bin/bash. The code in question is
# Move rotated logs to the archive
if [ -f $BASEDIR/*.gz ]; then
logger "$SNAME Moving rotated logs to $DIRECTORY"
mv $BASEDIR/*.gz $DIRECTORY
else
echo "$BASEDIR/*.gz"
logger "$SNAME No rotated logs to move. Is this normal?"
fi
In bash the conditional check works great, under sh it complains there are too many arguments. If I put things in quotes it doesn't see the wildcard and aways returns false.
Any help would be fantastic!
The problem here is that [ -f pathname ] takes exactly one name ([ -f one.gz two.gz ] isn't valid test syntax), but you don't know how many names *.gz expands to.
check() {
set -- "$BASEDIR"/*.gz
if [ -f "$1" ] || [ -L "$1" ]; then
logger "$SNAME Moving rotated logs to $DIRECTORY"
mv -- "$#" "$DIRECTORY"
else
echo "$BASEDIR/*.gz"
logger "$SNAME No rotated logs to move. Is this normal?"
fi
}
check
Breaking this down:
check() { ... } defines a function named check, which we then call later.
set -- "$BASEDIR"/*.gz replaces the function's argument list (this is why we're using a function, so we don't overwrite the whole script's argument list!) with a list of files with names ending in *.gz.
[ -f "$1" ] tests if the first name in this list exists -- if it does, then we know that the expansion was successful. [ -L "$1" ] can also be true if the glob successfully expanded but the first entry was a symlink to a file that doesn't exist; by including it, we cover that corner case.
mv -- "$#" "$DIRECTORY" reuses that argument list to pass to mv. The -- argument specifies to mv that all following arguments are names, even if they start with -s.
How about this:
if ls "$BASEDIR"/*.gz
then
echo "moving them ..."
else
echo "No such file!"
fi
This is basically a follow-up to Linux: Move 1 million files into prefix-based created Folders
The original question:
I want to write a shell command to rename all of those images into the
following format:
original: filename.jpg new: /f/i/l/filename.jpg
Now, I want to take all of those files and add an additional level to the directory structure, e.g:
original: /f/i/l/filename.jpg new: /f/i/l/e/filename.jpg
Is this possible to do with command line or bash?
One way to do it is to simply loop over all the directories you already have, and in each bottom-level subdirectory create the new subdirectory and move the files:
for d in ?/?/?/; do (
cd "$d" &&
printf '%.4s\0' * | uniq -z |
xargs -0 bash -c 'for prefix do
s=${prefix:3:1}
mkdir -p "$s" && mv "$prefix"* "$s"
done' _
) done
That probably needs a bit of explanation.
The glob ?/?/?/ matches all directory paths made up of three single-character subdirectories. Because it ends with a /, everything it matches is a directory so there is no need to test.
( cd "$d" && ...; )
executes ... after cd'ing to the appropriate subdirectory. Putting that block inside ( ) causes it to be executed in a subshell, which means the scope of the cd will be restricted to the parenthesized block. That's easier and safer than putting cd .. at the end.
We then collecting the subdirectories first, by finding the unique initial strings of the files:
printf '%.4s\0' * | uniq -z | xargs -0 ...
That extracts the first four letters of each filename, nul-terminating each one, then passes this list to uniq to eliminate duplicates, providing the -z option because the input is nul-terminated, and then passes the list of unique prefixes to xargs, again using -0 to indicate that the list is nul-terminated. xargs executes a command with a list of arguments, issuing the command several times only if necessary to avoid exceeding the command-line limit. (We probably could have avoided the use of xargs but it doesn't cost that much and it's a lot safer.)
The command called with xargs is bash itself; we use the -c option to pass it a command to be executed. That command iterates over its arguments by using the for arg in syntax. Each argument is a unique prefix; we extract the fourth character from the prefix to construct the new subdirectory and then mv all files whose names start with the prefix into the newly created directory.
The _ at the end of the xargs invocation will be passed to bash (as with all the rest of the arguments); bash -c uses the first argument following the command as the $0 argument to the script, which is not part of the command line arguments iterated over by the for arg in syntax. So putting the _ there means that the argument list constructed by xargs will be precisely $1, $2, ... in the execution of the bash command.
Okay, so I've created a very crude solution:
#!/bin/bash
for file1 in *; do
if [[ -d "$file1" ]]; then
cd "$file1"
for file2 in *; do
if [[ -d "$file2" ]]; then
cd "$file2"
for file3 in *; do
if [[ -d "$file3" ]]; then
cd "$file3"
for file4 in *; do
if [[ -f "$file4" ]]; then
echo "mkdir -p ${file4:3:1}/; mv $file4 ${file4:3:1}/;"
mkdir -p ${file4:3:1}/; mv $file4 ${file4:3:1}/;
fi
done
cd ..
fi
done
cd ..
fi
done
cd ..
fi
done
I should warn that this is untested, as my actual structure varies slightly, but I wanted to keep the question/answer consistent with the original question for clarity.
That being said, I'm sure a much more elegant solution exists than this one.
My problem is that i have to check what files are included in the $directory, then i have to make a new file with name specified by me and compare if the name doesn't already exist in this directory (compare 2 directories).
Below is my code:
directory=$(pwd -L "/$nameProject")
read -p "Enter repo name: " nameRepo
# Check if repo name exists in $directory
if [$(find "$directory/$nameProject" -path "$directory/$nameProject/*")==$("$directory/$nameProject/$nameRepo")]; then
instruction..
fi
Thank you for any help!
Did you try
if [[ ! -d "$directory/$nameProject/$nameRepo" && ! -f "$directory/$nameProject/$nameRepo"]] ; then
mkdir "$directory/$nameProject/$nameRepo"
fi
You can split the above if loop into two and print appropriate error by removing !
Spaces are important to the shell. So is quoting. You need spaces around [ and == and ] (though ]; is ok). (Also technically the comparison operator is = and not ==.).
Also find can return more than one result which will cause problems for your test.
If you want to test whether a directory (or file) with a given name exists then you don't need (or want) to use find. You can just use the -d and -f (and -e) tests of the [ test binary/built-in directly(spec, bashref).
if [ -d path/to/directory ]; then
echo "Was a directory"
else
echo "Was not a directory"
fi