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bashshellpathglobexpansion

Globbing/pathname expansion with colon as separator

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 compatible) matching the pattern?

i.e. echo /var/lib/gems/*/bin will return

/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin /var/lib/gems/1.9.1/bin

I want

/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:/var/lib/gems/1.9.1/bin

instead.

The obvious approach is simply to replace the space character with ':' via tr, but that doesn't work if the filename itself contains the space character.

Solution

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

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

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