Determine whether a file exists or not in Bash

April 15, 2023

The Problem

How can I determine whether a file exists in Bash? Conversely, how can I test that it does not exist?

The Solution

We can check whether a file exists using the test command-line utility:

if test -f /path/to/file; then
  echo "File exists."
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To check whether a file does not exist, we can negate the condition with the NOT logical operator, ! :

if ! test -f /path/to/file; then
  echo "File does not exist."