Globbing/pathname expansion with colon as separator

Question

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 com

Answer 1

printf "%s\n" /var/lib/gems/*/bin | tr "\n" ":"

Answer 2

It's pretty trivial if you drop into Perl:

perl -e 'print join ":", @ARGV' /var/lib/gems/*/bin

Or Python:

python -c 'import sys; print ":".join(sys.argv[1:])' /var/lib/gems/*/bin

Or any number of other popular scripting languages.