Question

In as script I have the statement

eval cp "$chapter"/subsections/* $temp/subsections

However, I am not sure there are actually files in “$chapter”/subsections/. As a consequence I get errors :

cp: cannot stat `Commissioning/subsections/*': No such file or directory

Is there an option in cp to avoid complaints (I couldn’t find any) ?

Is there a simple way to check existence of any file in a directory ?

Answer 1

It’s not really cp complaining. When you use wildcards like *, the shell replaces them with the complete list of all matching files. When no files match, it just leaves the *, telling cp to copy file named *.

You can use the following trick instead:

cp -r "${chapter}"/subsections/. "${temp}"/subsections

Now you will be passing the whole directory to cp, with request to copy it recursively. And since you are referring to it through ., cp won’t copy its name but only the contents.