Question

I’m looping through certain files (all files starting with MOVIE) in a folder with this bash script code:

for i in MY-FOLDER/MOVIE*
do

which works fine when there are files in the folder. But when there aren’t any, it somehow goes on with one file which it thinks is named MY-FOLDER/MOVIE*.

How can I avoid it to enter the things after

do

if there aren’t any files in the folder?

Answer 1

for i in $(find MY-FOLDER/MOVIE -type f); do
  echo $i
done

The find utility is one of the Swiss Army knives of linux. It starts at the directory you give it and finds all files in all subdirectories, according to the options you give it.

-type f will find only regular files (not directories).

As I wrote it, the command will find files in subdirectories as well; you can prevent that by adding -maxdepth 1

---

Edit, 8 years later (thanks for the comment, @tadman!)

You can avoid the loop altogether with

find . -type f -exec echo "{}" \;

This tells find to echo the name of each file by substituting its name for {}. The escaped semicolon is necessary to terminate the command that’s passed to -exec.