Is there an easy way to set nullglob for one glob

Question

In bash, if you do this:

mkdir /tmp/empty
array=(/tmp/empty/*)

you find that array now has one element, \"/tmp/empty/*\"

Answer 1

This may be close to what you want; as is, it requires executing a command to expand the glob.

$ ls
file1 file2
$ array=( $(shopt -s nullglob; ls foo*) )
$ ls foo*
ls: foo*: No such file or directory
$ echo ${array[*]}
file1 file2

Instead of setting array in the subshell, we create a subshell using $() whose output is captured by array.