How to check if a file exists on a remote server

Last updated on August 8, 2020 by Dan Nanni

There are circumstances where you want to test if a file exists somewhere on a remote Linux server (e.g., /var/run/test_daemon.pid), without logging in to the server interactively. For example, you may want your script to behave differently depending on whether or not a specific file exists on a remote server.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to check if a remote file exists in different script languages (e.g., bash shell, Perl, Python).

The approach described here will use ssh to access a remote host. You first need to enable key-based SSH authentication to the remote host, so that your script can access a remote host in non-interactive batch mode. You also need to make sure that SSH login has read permission on the file to check. Assuming that you have finished these two steps, you can write scripts like the following examples.

Check if a file exists on a remote server in Bash

#!/bin/bash

ssh_host="xmodulo@remote_server"
file="/var/run/test.pid"

if ssh $ssh_host test -e $file;
    then echo $file exists
    else echo $file does not exist
fi

Check if a file exists on a remote server in Perl

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $ssh_host = "xmodulo@remote_server";
my $file = "/var/run/test.pid";

system "ssh", $ssh_host, "test", "-e", $file;
my $rc = $? >> 8;
if ($rc) {
    print "$file doesn't existn";
} else {
    print "$file existsn";
}

Check if a file exists on a remote server in Python

#!/usr/bin/python

import subprocess
import pipes

ssh_host = 'xmodulo@remote_server'
file = '/var/run/test.pid'

resp = subprocess.call(
    ['ssh', ssh_host, 'test -e ' + pipes.quote(file)])

if resp == 0:
    print ('%s exists' % file)
else:
    print ('%s does not exist' % file)

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