I'm looking for an elegant way in Vimscript to check if a file exists in the current directory.
I came up with the code below but I'm not sure if that's the most elegant solution (I'll set a Vim option if the file exists). Is there any way of not having to do another comparison of the filename?
Maybe use a different built-in function from Vim?
:function! SomeCheck()
: if findfile("SpecificFile", ".") == "SpecificFile"
: echo "SpecificFile exists"
: endif
:endfunction
With a bit of searching in vim man
I've found this, which looks much better that the original:
:function! SomeCheck()
: if filereadable("SpecificFile")
: echo "SpecificFile exists"
: endif
:endfunction
Some of the comments express concerns about filereadable
and using glob
instead. This addresses the issue of having a file that does exist, but permissions prevent it from being read. If you want to detect such cases, the following will work:
:if !empty(glob("path/to/file"))
: echo "File exists."
:endif
E116: Invalid arguments for function
. How do you specify the file relative to the home directory to check for a plugin? (See also here)
~
, but I'm not positive. What arguments did you supply when you got that error?
~
, and it gave that error. Now I tried again and it works... :-)
Giving some more visibility to metaphy's comment on the accepted answer:
if filereadable(expand("~/.vim/bundle/vundle/README.md")) let g:hasVundle = 1 endif
filereadable
is what is required, but there's an extra handy step of expand
, should you be using ~
in your path:
:function! SomeCheck()
: if filereadable(expand("SpecificFile"))
: echo "SpecificFile exists"
: endif
:endfunction
For example
:echo filereadable('~/.vimrc') gives 0,
:echo filereadable(expand('~/.vimrc')) gives 1
Sorry if it's too late, but doing
if !empty(expand(glob("filename")))
echo "File exists"
else
echo "File does not exists"
endif
works fine for me
Success story sharing
filereadable
mentions you can useglob
if you don't care about readability.