Need to check if .gz files exist in a directory

Question

I have a prompt in my shell script where the user can choose a directory. I am trying to make it so that if a .gz file exists in that directory, they exit the loop, and if not, the user is asked again to choose a directory, but it just isn't working. Here's what I have so far:

ls -d */
while :
do
echo "Which Directory do you want to access?"
read input_variable1
cd $input_variable1
if [ CHECK FOR .gz ]
then
break
else
ls -d */
echo "no .gz files to unzip. Try again."
fi
done

GuiltyDolphin · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-27T20:05:48.200

1

Test supports using wildcards, so [ -f *.gz ] will be true if there is one file matching *.gz (and false otherwise - as @tripleee pointed out, this will fail with multiple matches; see below for a better variant).

Another possibility is to use if ls *.gz &>/dev/null; then ...; else ...; fi (which will not throw any errors).

edited May 27 '16 at 20:05

answered May 27 '16 at 15:57

GuiltyDolphin

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Thanks! Helped a lot – Matt May 27 '16 at 16:31
But it will fail with a syntax error if there is more than one matching file. – tripleee May 27 '16 at 16:36
@tripleee True, I've updated the response to include a version that won't fail. – GuiltyDolphin May 27 '16 at 17:38
1

The command substitution is quite superfluous there. See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6363441/check-if-a-file-exists-with-wildcard-in-shell-script – tripleee May 27 '16 at 18:17

Need to check if .gz files exist in a directory

1 Answers1