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

This should do it for you:

dirs=(/var/lib/gems/*/bin)    # put filenames (dirnames) in an array
saveIFS=$IFS IFS=':'          # set the Internal Field Separator to the desired delimiter
dirs=("${dirs[*]}")           # convert the array to a scalar with the new delimiter
IFS=$saveIFS                  # restore IFS