Checking if a file exists in several directories

Question

I've been working on this far too long and need some help. I need a script that will look at files in a directory and see if it exists in one of several directories.

I need something like this:

for files in /downloads/ #may or may not be in a sub-directory
do
   print if file exists in /media/tv, /media/movie, or /media/music
done

the files will not be in the root of the directory. I cant just search /media, because I don't want to search in cd-rom or videos

I am using the latest version of Ubuntu server

Answer 1

You don't mention if you need to keep the files (perhaps removing duplicates?), hardlink them or anything else.

So, depending on your intention, the best solution would be to use one program like rdfind (not interactive), fdupes (more interactive, allowing you to choose which files to keep or not), duff (to only report the files that were duplicate) or many others.

If you want something fancier with a GUI that will let you choose what to keep via a point-and-click interface, then fslint (via its fslint-gui command) would be my recommended choice.

All of the above are available in Debian's repository and, by transition, I think that they are in Ubuntu's or Linux Mint's repositories, if that's what you are using.

Answer 2

Here is an implementation in bash using brace expansion:

the_file=foo.mp3
for file in /downloads/media/{tv,movie,music}/"$the_file"; do 
   if [[ -e $file ]]; then
      printf '%s found in %s:\n' "$the_file" "${file%/*}"
   fi
done

Answer 3

This could be very slow if you traverse /downloads or /media for each file name. So traverse each hierarchy only once, store the list of file names, and then process the lists.

For simplicity, I assume that your file names don't contain any newlines.

find /downloads -type f | sed 's!^.*/\(.*\)$!\1/&!' |
  sort >/tmp/downloads.find
find /media/tv /media/music /media/movie -type f |
  sed 's!^.*/\(.*\)$!\1/&!' |
  sort >/tmp/media.find

At this point, the two .find files contain lists of file paths, with the name of the file prepended, sorted by file name. Join the files on the first /-separated field, and clean up the result a bit.

join -j 1 -t / /tmp/downloads.find /tmp/media.find |
  sed -e 's![^/]*/!!' -e 's![^/]*/! has the same name as !'

Answer 4

echo "Enter file name"
read file
flag=0

for i in 'ls'
do
  if [ $i == $file ] ;then
    echo "File exist"
    flag=1
    break;
  fi
done

if [ $flag == 0 ] ;then
  echo "File not exist"
fi