On Tue, 2014-11-18 at 12:58 -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Doesn't the description of the -A option I quoted upthread hint a > simpler and clearer solution? I.e. "test $(ls -A | wc -l) = 0"? Yes, but unfortunately for us the -A flag was added to POSIX Issue 7. It's not present in the previous version of POSIX, Issue 6: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/ls.html It came from the BSD world, so it might not be available on older SysV-derived systems (AIX, HP-UX, even Solaris... I don't have access to these anymore so I can't say). Ultimately it's probably more portable to assume "ls -a" always prints "." and ".." than to assume "ls -A" is supported. Cheers! -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html