Question

I would like some help in finding a way to check if files matching a certain regex exist in a directory. Currently, I am using the following method, but it will return an error in certain cases:

ls srv_*.log

The above command will result in ls: cannot access srv_*.log: No such file or directory if there are no files in the directory matching the regex.

The regex I am trying to match is “srv_*.log”

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

Answer 1

srv_*.log is not a regex but a glob matcher.

You can just capture the output and redirect stderr to /dev/null:

FILES_LIST="$(ls srv_*.log 2>/dev/null)"
for file in $FILES_LIST; do
    #something with $file
done

And you could even do without FILES_LIST here.