From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Aug 10 12:12:10 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from web1607.mail.yahoo.com (web1607.mail.yahoo.com [128.11.23.149]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 8C5B537BB4A for ; Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:12:04 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from e_gravel@yahoo.com) Received: (qmail 27628 invoked by uid 60001); 10 Aug 2000 19:12:04 -0000 Message-ID: <20000810191204.27627.qmail@web1607.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [208.218.238.4] by web1607.mail.yahoo.com; Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:12:04 PDT Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:12:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Emmanuel Gravel Subject: [OT] shell scripting, testing for files To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG First off, I'm not subscribed through this email address, but I will follow the online archives, so if you simply "reply" it'll take longer for me to answer :) OK, here's my question. I'm trying to create a simple shell script which will test for the existance of a file whose name follows a pattern (ex: r*.txt). If I use "if test -e r*.txt" it works very well as long as I don't have more than one file with that pattern (in which case it chokes). If I use "if return=`ls r*.txt`" it works well if I have one or more files (in which case it saves the output to $return), however if there are now files which follow the pattern, I get an unwanted error message from ls (that I would want to suppress, but haven't found any option to do so). So neither method works for my purpose, and I don't know where to look. Anywone have an idea on how I can check for the existance of one or more files of a certain name pattern? Essentially, that's all I want to know (if there is, I can always do an ls later on). Thanks! Emmanuel __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message