Re: -e and permission denied

[Greg Wooledge]

On Thu, Oct 03, 2013 at 03:18:16AM -0700, victor@vsespb.ru wrote:
> -e will return file not exists, even if it does, when permission denied error
> happen. I am wondering if this documented/correct behaviour or no.

I assume you mean that bash will return 1 (failure) for [[ -e /path/to/file ]]
when bash does not have search/execute privileges on all the directories
in /path/to/.  In which case, bash cannot stat() the file to see whether
it exists.

imadev:~$ mkdir -p /tmp/a/b/c 
imadev:~$ touch /tmp/a/b/c/file
imadev:~$ [[ -e /tmp/a/b/c/file ]]; echo $?
0
imadev:~$ chmod 000 /tmp/a/b/c
imadev:~$ [[ -e /tmp/a/b/c/file ]]; echo $?
1

How else would you expect bash to handle this?