ksh: Checking for file existence

[Ross Druker]

I have what may be a trivial problem, but I haven't solved it yet.
I'm using the Korn shell a script on an HP-UX system.  I would like
to check for the existence of ANY data files, not a specific file.
I was trying to use the "test" command.  This HP-UX does NOT have the
[[...]] operator, even though this was supposedly available after
1986 versions of ksh, :-(

I would like to do:

if test -r  *.data

But ksh barks back with a syntax error.  test doesn't like wildcards.
I've been trying to get around this, playing with quotes, etc.  The
last thing I tried was to assign the list of filenames to a variable,
as in:

filelist=*.data

What I've discovered is that ksh does NOT assign the corresponding
string to filelist.  In the csh world you'd get a wordlist.  For
instance, in csh, if there were files a.data and b.data,

echo $filelist AND echo "$filelist" both return:
a.data b.data

But in ksh, echo $filelist returns:
a.data b.data

and echo "$filelist" returns:
*.data

The filelist variable never takes on the value of the filenames really.
I was heading this way to possibly try and extract the first filename
from the variable and see if I could use that somehow.  But then I
ran into this.

Sorry to be so verbose, but does anyone have the answer that I'm too
blind to see?


Ross Druker
Rohm and Haas Co.
rs0vrd at rohmhaas.com