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

Here is an excellent discussion of what you are trying to do.

The short answer is that you want an array:

dirs=(/content/{dev01,dev01})

But what you do with the results can get more complex than what you were aiming for I think.

Answer 2

The issue which no-one has addressed is that the variable assignment makes the difference.

dirs=/content/{dev01,dev02}

expands differently than

echo /content/{dev01,dev02}

The question is how to assign the results of the expansion to dirs

See: How to use Bash substitution in a variable declaration