Re: best way to test for empty dir?

[Greg Wooledge]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 04:16:13PM +0000, Marc Herbert wrote:
> In case anyone is interested my winner (so far) is:
> 
> exists()
> {
>     [ -e "$1" -o -L "$1" ]
> }
> 
> if exists foo/*; then
>   for f in foo/*; do
>     ...
>   done
> fi

What if there's a subdirectory or something and you'd like to skip it?

for f in foo/*; do
  test -f "$f" || continue
  ...
done

Hence my explanations at the bottom of http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/004