Check whether a certain file type/extension exists

Question

How would you go about telling whether files of a specific extension are present in a directory, with bash?

Something like

if [ -e *.flac ]; then 
echo true; 
fi 

Answer 1

shopt -s nullglob
if [[ -n $(echo *.flac) ]]    # or [ -n "$(echo *.flac)" ]
then 
    echo true
fi

Answer 2

For completion, with zsh:

if [[ -n *.flac(#qN) ]]; then
  echo true
fi

This is listed at the end of the Conditional Expressions section in the zsh manual. Since [[ disables filename globbing, we need to force filename generation using (#q) at the end of the globbing string, then the N flag (NULL_GLOB option) to force the generated string to be empty in case there’s no match.

Answer 3

#/bin/bash

myarray=(`find ./ -maxdepth 1 -name "*.py"`)
if [ ${#myarray[@]} -gt 0 ]; then 
    echo true 
else 
    echo false
fi

Answer 4

This uses ls(1), if no flac files exist, ls reports error and the script exits; othewise the script continues and the files may be be processed

#! /bin/sh
ls *.flac  >/dev/null || exit
## Do something with flac files here

Answer 5

#!/bin/bash
files=$(ls /home/somedir/*.flac 2> /dev/null | wc -l)
if [ "$files" != "0" ]
then
echo "Some files exists."
else
echo "No files with that extension."
fi

Answer 6

Here's a fairly simple solution:

if [ "$(ls -A | grep -i \\.flac\$)" ]; then echo true; fi

As you can see, this is only one line of code, but it works well enough. It should work with both bash, and a posix-compliant shell like dash. It's also case-insensitive, and doesn't care what type of files (regular, symlink, directory, etc.) are present, which could be useful if you have some symlinks, or something.