Bash – Check whether files in a file list exist in a certain directory

bashfilesscriptingshell

The runtime arguments are as follows: $1 is the path to the file containing the list of files
$2 is the path to the directory containing the files
What I want to do is check that each file listed in $1 exists in the $2 directory

I'm thinking something like:

for f in 'cat $1'
do
if (FILEEXISTSIN$2DIRECTORY)
then echo '$f exists in $2'
else echo '$f is missing in $2' sleep 5 exit
fi
done

As you can see, I want it so that if any of the files listed in $1 don't exist in the directory $2, the script states this then closes. The only part I can't get my head around is the (FILEEXISTSIN$2DIRECTORY) part. I know that you can do [ -e $f ] but I don't know how you can make sure its checking that it exists in the $2 directory.

Best Answer

The best way to iterate over the lines in a file is using the read builtin in a while loop. This is what you are looking for:

while IFS= read -r f; do
    if [[ -e $2/$f ]]; then
        printf '%s exists in %s\n' "$f" "$2"
    else
        printf '%s is missing in %s\n' "$f" "$2"
        exit 1
    fi
done < "$1"
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