I don't know what is wrong with this piece of code.
It works fine when there is 1 or more .exe files in the directory. However, Count will still print Count: 1 even when there is no .exe file in the directory.

#!sh

count=0

for file in *.exe
do
     count=`expr "$count" + 1`
done

echo "Count: $count"

I'm guessing here, but I think a DO loop will execute once even if the expression is false, you are adding 1 to $count so $count will always show 1 more than there should be, or at at least 1 as a minimum.

I (again think) a while loop may solve your problems.

It's more subtle than that... If you supply the shell with a wildcard expression and there are no files that match the expression, then the shell uses that expression as is... In other words

echo *.exe

will actually display *.exe if there are no files that match!!

This is what is happening here, so there will always be one entry in the list so your loop will always execute once. The do...done is not a separate construct in the shell - it's tied to the "for" so the semantics are as you expect.

You could modify your code to be

count=0
for file in *.exe
do
 if [ -e $file ]
 then
   count=`expr $count + 1`
 fi
done

which catches the pathological case you've described[i][/i]

Thanks, George (and welcome here!).  I saw that question briefly and was scratching my head until you posted.  Thanks!

yep...George...  That was going to be my second guess

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