On Aug 15, 2012, at 5:11 PM, fred smith wrote: > how about something (seemingly simple) like this: > > find out how many there are: > > count=`ls * | grep -c .MOV$` > > then diagnose the result: > > if [ $count -ge 1 ] > then > do your stuff here > else > echo oops. nothing to do! > fi > > of course, there are pitfalls... we're asuming that there are only FILES > that would match the pattern ".MOV", no directories. ---- very effective for my purposes, thanks. Craig