How to assign a glob expression to a variable in a Bash script?

Question

When the following two lines of code are executed in a bash script, \"ls\" complains that the files don\'t exist:

dirs=/content/{dev01,dev02}
ls -l $dirs
         


        

Answer 1

I suspect that what you need is an array, but that will restrict you to newer bashes. It is saver than using eval.

dirs=( /"content with spaces"/{dev01,dev02} )

dirs=( /content/{dev01,dev02} )
ls -l "${dirs[@]}"

---

/content/{dev01,dev02}

will expand to:

"/content/dev01" "/content/dev02"

The existence of those directories is irrelevant to the expansion.

It becomes unpredictable when you assign a variable to a brace expansion.

dirs=/content/{dev01,dev02}

may turn into

"/content/dev01"

or

"/content/dev01 /content/dev02"

or

"/content/dev01" "/content/dev02"

or

"/content/{dev01,dev02}"

If you quote the braces in any way they will not expand, so the result will contain the braces and be mostly meaningless.