Question

Have documents stored in a file system which includes “daily” directories, e.g. 20050610. In a bash script I want to list the files in a months worth of these directories. So I’m running a find command find <path>/200506* -type f >> jun2005.lst. Would like to check that this set of directories is not a null set before executing the find command. However, if I use if[ -d 200506* ] I get a “too many arguements error. How can I get around this?

Answer 1

Your “too many arguments” error does not come from there being a huge number of files and exceeding the command line argument limit. It comes from having more than one or two directories that match the glob. Your glob “200506*” expands to something like “20050601 20050602 20050603…” and the -d test only expects one argument.

$ mkdir test
$ cd test
$ mkdir a1
$ [ -d a* ]    # no error
$ mkdir a2
$ [ -d a* ]
-bash: [: a1: binary operator expected
$ mkdir a3
$ [ -d a* ]
-bash: [: too many arguments

The answer by zed_0xff is on the right track, but I’d use a different approach:

shopt -s nullglob
path='/path/to/dirs'
glob='200506*/'
outfile='jun2005.lst'
dirs=("$path"/$glob)  # dirs is an array available to be iterated over if needed
if (( ${#dirs[@]} > 0 ))
then
    echo "directories found"
    # append may not be necessary here 
    find "$path"/$glob -type f >> "$outfile"
fi

The position of the quotes in "$path"/$glob versus "$path/$glob" is essential to this working.

Edit:

Corrections made to exclude files that match the glob (so only directories are included) and to handle the very unusual case of a directory named literally like the glob (“200506*”).