Question

From a shell script, how do I check if a directory contains files?

Something similar to this

if [ -e /some/dir/* ]; then echo 'huzzah'; fi; 

but which works if the directory contains one or several files (the above one only works with exactly 0 or 1 files).

Answer 1

The solutions so far use ls. Here’s an all bash solution:

#!/bin/bash shopt -s nullglob dotglob     # To include hidden files files=(/some/dir/*) if [ ${#files[@]} -gt 0 ]; then echo 'huzzah'; fi