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Thursday, April 23, 2009

file test operators in bash

Often while writing shell scripts, various tests need to be performed on files. For example, we need to check if a file exists before copying it somewhere. We need to check the existence of a directory before writing files into it.

Bash comes with the following list of operators to perform these tests.
Operator    Tests Whether
-e File exists
-f File is a regular file
-d File is a directory
-h File is a symbolic link
-L File is a symbolic link
-b File is a block device
-c File is a character device
-p File is a pipe
-S File is a socket
-t File is associated with a terminal

-N File was modified since last read
-O You own the file
-G Group id of the file is same as yours

-s File is not zero size

-r File has read permission
-w File has write permission
-x File has execute permission

-g sgid flag set
-u suid flag set
-k "sticky bit" set

F1 -nt F2 File F1 is newer than F2 *
F1 -ot F2 File F1 is older than F2 *
F1 -ef F2 Files F1 and F2 are hard links to the same file *


! NOT (inverts the sense of above tests)

* signifies a binary operator (requires two operands).


Reference :- Appendix B of "Advanced Bash-Scripting guide" by Mendel Cooper, Version 6.5. Debian users can get this document by installing the abs-guide package.
sudo apt-get install abs-guide

The necessary files can be found in /usr/share/doc/abs-guide . However, the abs-guide package contains only the html version of the document. A pdf version can be downloaded from http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/abs-guide.pdf .

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

-s file is not zero size
-S file is a socket

Kamaraju Kusumanchi said...

Thanks for pointing it out. I updated the post.

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