Question

How do I check (with the shell) if a file with the file-extension .ini exists in /dir?
What would be the fastest way? Thanks!

Answer 1

set -- /dir/*.ini
case $1 in
  ('/dir/*.ini') echo "No ini files here.";;
  (*)            echo "Found $# ini files: $@";;
esac

Look ma! No forks! This should beat, by a million of CPU cycles, any solution with forks to ls, find and friends.

Now there’s one little gotcha here. Can you spot it? Okay, what happens if /dir contains a file named *.ini literally (star, dot, ini)? The above will give you a false negative: it reports no ini file although there is one. If you want to prepare for this case (and you should, because you are a careful programmer, giving attention to detail, no gotchas in your code, right?), you slightly modify the first case to read

('/dir/*.ini')
  if test -f '/dir/*.ini'; then
    echo "Wow, there's a plain file named '/dir/*.ini'!"
  else
    echo "No ini files here."
  fi;;