Prevent "mv" command from raising error if no file matches the glob. eg" mv *.json /dir/ - bash

Question

I want to move all JSON files created within a jenkins job to a different folder.
It is possible that the job does not create any json file.
In that case the mv command is raising an error and so that job is failing.
How do I prevent mv command from raising error in case no file is found?

Answer 1

Welcome to SO.
Why do you not want the error?
If you just don't want to see the error, then you could always just throw it away with 2>/dev/null, but PLEASE don't do that. Not every error is the one you expect, and this is a debugging nightmare. You could write it to a log with 2>$logpath and then build in logic to read that to make certain it's ok, and ignore or respond accordingly --
mv *.json /dir/ 2>$someLog
executeMyLogParsingFunction # verify expected err is the ONLY err
If it's because you have set -e or a trap in place, and you know it's ok for the mv to fail (which might not be because there is no file!), then you can use this trick -
mv *.json /dir/ || echo "(Error ok if no files found)"
or
mv *.json /dir/ ||: # : is a no-op synonym for "true" that returns 0
see https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Conditional-Constructs.html
(If it's failing simply because the mv is returning a nonzero as the last command, you could also add an explicit exit 0, but don't do that either - fix the actual problem rather than patching the symptom. Any of these other solutions should handle that, but I wanted to point out that unless there's a set -e or a trap that catches the error, it shouldn't cause the script to fail unless it's the very last command.)
Better would be to specifically handle the problem you expect without disabling error handling on other problems.
shopt -s nullglob # globs with no match do not eval to the glob as a string
for f in *.json; do mv "$f" /dir/; done # no match means no loop entry
c.f. https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Shopt-Builtin.html
or if you don't want to use shopt,
for f in *.json; do [[ -e "$f" ]] && mv "$f" /dir/; done
Note that I'm only testing existence, so that will include any match, including directories, symlinks, named pipes... you might want [[ -f "$f" ]] && mv "$f" /dir/ instead.
c.f. https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Conditional-Expressions.html

Answer 2

This is expected behavior -- it's why the shell leaves *.json unexpanded when there are no matches, to allow mv to show a useful error.
If you don't want that, though, you can always check the list of files yourself, before passing it to mv. As an approach that works with all POSIX-compliant shells, not just bash:
#!/bin/sh
# using a function here gives us our own private argument list.
# that's useful because minimal POSIX sh doesn't provide arrays.
move_if_any() {
dest=$1; shift # shift makes the old $2 be $1, the old $3 be $2, etc.
# so, we then check how many arguments were left after the shift;
# if it's only one, we need to also check whether it refers to a filesystem
# object that actually exists.
if [ "$#" -gt 1 ] || [ -e "$1" ] || [ -L "$1" ]; then
mv -- "$#" "$dest"
fi
}
# put destination_directory/ in $1 where it'll be shifted off
# $2 will be either nonexistent (if we were really running in bash with nullglob set)
# ...or the name of a legitimate file or symlink, or the string '*.json'
move_if_any destination_directory/ *.json
...or, as a more bash-specific approach:
#!/bin/bash
files=( *.json )
if (( ${#files[#]} > 1 )) || [[ -e ${files[0]} || -L ${files[0]} ]]; then
mv -- "${files[#]}" destination/
fi

Answer 3

Loop over all json files and move each of them, if it exists, in a oneliner:
for X in *.json; do [[ -e $X ]] && mv "$X" /dir/; done