Globbing/pathname expansion with colon as separator

Question

How can I convert a string containing glob characters such as

/var/lib/gems/*/bin

into a colon-separated string of filenames (i.e. PATH com

Answer 1

Actually, I thought of a better solution: use a shell function.

function join() {
    local IFS=$1
    shift
    echo "$*"
}

mystring=$(join ':' /var/lib/gems/*/bin)