sh - Check if a file exists with a wildcard in a shell script

Question

This question already has answers here:

Answer 1

For Bash scripts, the most direct and performant approach is:

if compgen -G "${PROJECT_DIR}/*.png" > /dev/null; then
    echo "pattern exists!"
fi

This will work very speedily even in directories with millions of files and does not involve a new subshell.

Source

---

The simplest should be to rely on ls return value (it returns non-zero when the files do not exist):

if ls /path/to/your/files* 1> /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "files do exist"
else
    echo "files do not exist"
fi

I redirected the ls output to make it completely silent.

---

Here is an optimization that also relies on glob expansion, but avoids the use of ls:

for f in /path/to/your/files*; do

    ## Check if the glob gets expanded to existing files.
    ## If not, f here will be exactly the pattern above
    ## and the exists test will evaluate to false.
    [ -e "$f" ] && echo "files do exist" || echo "files do not exist"

    ## This is all we needed to know, so we can break after the first iteration
    break
done

This is very similar to grok12's answer, but it avoids the unnecessary iteration through the whole list.