CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashshellunix
Rumen Hristov
Rumen Hristov

Reputation: 887

Check if a directory contains a particular subdirectory

I am trying to write a shell script, which checks if a given directory contains a particularly named subdirectory. I am passing the Parent directory as a first argument and only the name for the child directory. I want the script to go through the contents of the Parent and see if it contains a file of type directory, which is named with the name I am passing in for Child.

This is my code. In it I am trying to pipe the output of ls on the Parent to the egrep command. I am trying to write a regular expression that checks to see if the output of ls has a name that matches (not identically. just somewhere in its name) my child name.

PARENT=$1
CHILD=$2

DIRNUM=$(ls -l $PARENT | egrep -c '< $CHILD >')
echo $DIRNUM

Upvotes: 3

Views: 13788

Answers (2)

Claudio Corsi
Claudio Corsi

Reputation: 359

Use the find command like the following:

# find $parent -name \*${child}\* -and -type d

The type option is to insure that the found name is a directory.

This command will find all sub-directories located within $parent that contain $child in its name

Upvotes: 3

Etan Reisner
Etan Reisner

Reputation: 80921

Don't do this. Don't parse ls.

Just check for the file/directory directly with the [/test built-in/command.

path=$parent/$child
if [ -d "$path" ]; then
    echo "$path exists."
else
    echo "$path does not exist."
fi

You'll note that I switched case on the variable names. ALL_UPPER variables are "reserved" for the shell's use you shouldn't use any.

Upvotes: 8

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