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

I would do it like this:

for FOO in ryan/smells-*; do
  touch "$FOO"/rotten_eggs
done

This way $FOO contains the actual directory name, not the glob pattern. If there's more than one match, though, it will only contain the last one after the loop, so the array solution might be better for that case.