Calculated filenames are not found.

[joergi]

At the moment I'm using in my project the file-existence-action to check if some files are available.

I download some files.
I'm assuming that the file 93.pdf is there
but, as I want to have the complete test dynamical, I read the number from a file...

bash-linux:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2.3.2
      - uses: pCYSl5EDgo/cat@master
        id: read_recent
        with:
          path: issues.txt
          trim: true
      - run: echo $TEXT
        env:
          TEXT: ${{ steps.read_recent.outputs.text }}
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2.3.2
      - name: Download Issues with start and end limit
        id: normalIssuesWithRange
        run: bash ./linux_mac/magpi-issue-downloader.sh -f $((${{steps.read_recent.outputs.text}}-6)) -l $((${{steps.read_recent.outputs.text}}-5))
.
.
.
     - name: "Check file existence Linux"
        id: check_files
        uses: andstor/file-existence-action@v1
        with:
          files: "issues/MagPi$((${{steps.read_recent.outputs.text}}-5)).pdf"
          allow_failure: false
      - name: lslah
        run: ls -lah  issues
      - name: File exists
        if: steps.check_files.outputs.files_exists == 'false'
        run: exit 1

The download itself works, as I can see in the lslah

The problem is, that the file existence check is looking for:
These files doesn't exist: issues/MagPi$((98-5)).pdf
see here

I guess it has something todo with this fs.access problem @elizabrock was also writing!
as @elizabrock wrote: it "checks for the literal existence of the string that is passed in."

Is there any way to solve this by calculate it in the action?

[andstor]

Hi 👋

What you are trying to do here is to run evaluate an arithmetic expression in bash. This action currently takes a string input. I do not think (at least for now) that we should eval the strings as bash "commands". Allowing globs you would greatly simplify the file-name matching by matching the file names with a pattern, but that's a whole other story.

Instead, I suggest you add an additional step for calculating the required string input for the action (for example with bash). Then you set the result as an output, see outputs for composite run steps actions , and use this output variable in the file-existence-action files: "issues/MagPi${{steps.calculated_recent_read.outputs.text}}.pdf".

We could of course add a flag for "evaluating" the input string, but then I would need some more arguments for why such a feature is necessary.

[joergi]

I did it now with extra separated calculated variables. and that works!
I close this issue for now, thank you