Wildcard within quotations

Question

When I do the following:

rmdir /path/to/dir/*.lproj

it works fine.

When I do:

APP_RESOURCES="/path/to/dir"
rmdir "$APP_RESOURCES/*.lproj"

It doesn't work and says it literally looks for a directory named with an astrix-symbol. The wildcard doesn't get interpreted. How can this be made to work within quotations?

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 01 '16 at 08:40

5

Expansion is handled by the shell so you will have to write something like this:

APP_RESOURCES="/path/to/dir"
rmdir "${APP_RESOURCES}/"*.lproj

answered Jun 01 '16 at 08:40

riteshtch

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score 4 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:29

4

No globbing is done inside double quotes. Do

APP_RESOURCES="/path/to/dir"
rmdir "$APP_RESOURCES"/*.lproj

See this [ question ] for some detail.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:29

Community

1
1

answered Jun 01 '16 at 08:42

sjsam

21,411
5
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score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 01 '16 at 08:54

You are quoting your variable expansions, keep doing that. Bad thing is that you try to quote your globbing. For the shell to glob you shouldn't quote:

app_resource="/path/to/dir"
rmdir "$app_resource"/*.lproj

This will however still expand to /path/to/dir/*.lproj in cases where no match is found, consider this:

% app_resource="/path/to/dir"
% echo "$app_resource/something/that/doesnt/exists/"*.abc
/path/to/dir/something/that/doesnt/exists/*.abc

One way around that is to check if the file/directory exists:

app_resource="/path/to/dir"
dir_to_remove="$app_resource/"*.lproj
[ -d "$dir_to_remove" ] && rmdir "$dir_to_remove"

Wildcard within quotations

3 Answers3

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