Checking for existence of a file type in phing

Question

I am writing a build script in Phing and want to have an if statement which tests for the existence of any files with a given extension in a directory (.sql files in this case). I have tried to do this with <available> as shown below, with no luck (the <then> never gets executed. Anyone have any ideas?

<if>
     <available file="${build.pendingsql}/*" type="file" extension="sql"  />
     <then>

         <!-- Do stuff -->

     </then>
</if>

Answer 1

You can do something like that (tweak it to your exact needs, ls runs in current drectory):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="test" default="check">
    <target name="check">
        <exec checkreturn="true" command="ls *.sql" outputProperty="list"/>
        <if>
            <equals arg1="${list}" arg2="" />
            <then>
                <echo msg="not found"/>
            </then>
            <else>
                <echo msg="found ${list}"/>
            </else>
        </if>
    </target>
</project>

Answer 2

On my mac I ended up using the following:

<!-- Are there sql files in pending -->
<exec checkreturn="false" dir="${build.pendingsql}" command="ls *.sql" outputProperty="list"/>
<echo msg="${list}"/>
<if>
    <equals arg1="${list}" arg2="ls: *.sql: No such file or directory" />
    <then>
        <echo msg="No SQL patches found"/>
    </then>
    <else>
        <echo msg="SQL patches found"/>
    </else>
</if>

The major changes from the solution posted by Bolek are checkreturn needs to be false to account for ls exiting >0 and changing the equals test to "ls: *.sql: No such file or directory". I realise this is a little hacky and might break (based on languages/systems outputing a different "No such.." message) but it works for me.