I've searched around questions with similar issues but haven't found one that quite fits my situation.
Below is a very brief script that demonstrates the problem I'm facing:
#!/bin/bash
includeString="-wholename './public_html/*' -o -wholename './config/*'"
find . \( $includeString \) -type f -mtime -7 -print
Basically, we need to search inside a folder, but only in certain of its subfolders. In my longer script, includeString gets built from an array. For this demo, I kept things simple.
Basically, when I run the script, it doesn't find anything. No errors, but also no hits. If I manually run the find command, it works. If I remove ( $includeString ) it also works, though obviously it doesn't limit itself to the folders I want.
So why would the same command work from the command line but not from the bash script? What is it about passing in $includeString that way that causes it to fail?
You're running into an issue with how the shell handles variable expansion. In your script:
includeString="-wholename './public_html/*' -o -wholename './config/*'"
find . \( $includeString \) -type f -mtime -7 -print
This results in find looking for files where -wholename matches the literal string './public_html/*'. That is, a filename that contains single quotes. Since you don't have any whitespace in your paths, the easiest solution here would be to just drop the single quotes:
includeString="-wholename ./public_html/* -o -wholename ./config/*"
find . \( $includeString \) -type f -mtime -7 -print
Unfortunately, you'll probably get bitten by wildcard expansion here (the shell will attempt to expand the wildcards before find sees them).
But as Etan pointed out in his comment, this appears to be needlessly complex; you can simply do:
find ./public_html ./config -type f -mtime -7 -print