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How to check if a directory exists in a Bash Script?
Checking if a directory exists or not can be easily done with the script below
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY_PATH" ]; then
# If the $DIRECTORY_PATH exists, code inside the block will get executed
fi
Or to check if a directory doesn't exist:
if [ ! -d "$DIRECTORY_PATH" ]; then
# If the $DIRECTORY_PATH does not exists, code inside the block will get executed
fi
Note that a the code inside the if
block will still get executed if the folder was a symbolic link.
Also Note that, the "$DIRECTORY_PATH"
is enclosed with double quotes. This is to handle cases where the directory name can have spaces and special characters(wildcard characters). Let's say you had created a symbolic link of a folder.
ln -s "$DIRECTORY_PATH" "$SYMLINK_PATH"
Now if we check if the symbolic link, you will get an error rmdir: failed to remove 'symlink': Not a directory
if [ -d "$SYMLINK_PATH" ]; then
rmdir "$SYMLINK_PATH"
fi
So, to treat this edge case, we will have to handle symlink's condition as shown below.
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY_PATH" ]; then
if [ -L "$DIRECTORY_PATH" ]; then
# It is a symlink!
# Symbolic link specific commands go here.
rm "$DIRECTORY_PATH"
else
# It's a directory!
# Directory command goes here.
rmdir "$DIRECTORY_PATH"
fi
fi
The above code is an ideal way to check if a path is a directory or not.