When working on Linux, it’s common to need to verify whether a file exists. For this purpose you can use the ls command. The ls command is a simple way to check if a file exists.

ls /path/to/file

Output:

• If the file exists, its name will be displayed.
• If the file does not exist, you’ll see an error like this:

ls: cannot access '/path/to/file': No such file or directory

The following command silently checks a specific file exists on the system and print either “File exists” or “File does not exist” based on the result.

ls /path/to/file >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "File exists" || echo "File does not exist"