Often you may want to check if the size of a particular file is greater than zero in Bash.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
file_size=$(stat -c%s "c:/users/bobbi/data2/players.txt")
if (( file_size > 0 ))
then
echo "File size greater than zero"
else
echo "File size not greater than zero"
fi
This particular example finds the file size (in bytes) of a file named players.txt and stores the results in a variable named file_size.
We then use an if else statement to check if the value of file_size is greater than zero and return one of the following strings as a result:
- “File size greater than zero”
- “File size not greater than zero”
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Check if File Size is Greater than Zero in Bash
Suppose that we have a file named players.txt located at the following path on our computer:
- c:/users/bobbi/data2/players.txt
We can use the following syntax to first display the size of this file:
file_size=$(stat -c%s "c:/users/bobbi/data2/players.txt")
echo $file_size
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
From the output we can see that the file has a size of 122 bytes.
We can then use the following syntax to check if this file size is greater than zero:
if (( file_size > 0 ))
then
echo "File size greater than zero"
else
echo "File size not greater than zero"
fi
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
The output returns “File size greater than zero” since the file size is indeed greater than zero.
Note: Feel free to replace 0 in the if statement with a different number to instead check if the file is greater than a different size.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Delete All Empty Lines in File
Bash: How to Check if File Contains Specific String
Bash: How to Print Specific Range of Lines from File
