Assign results of globbing to a variable in Bash

Question

My colleague, Ryan, came to me with a bug in his Bash script, and I identified the problem with this test:

$ mkdir ryan
$ mkdir ryan/smells-bad
$ FOO=ryan/sm         


        

Answer 1

Consider

for dir in $FOO; do
    touch "$dir/rotten_eggs"
done

Note that this will touch multiple files if the glob pattern matches more than one pathname.