CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
Ken Reid
Ken Reid

Reputation: 609

Running ls with wildcard string

I was originally using this command, and it works fine (counting number of files with extension .sb):

ls -dq *.sb | wc -l

Output:

903

Now, I want to use a variable to store the string, like this:

search="*.sb"

Then, putting it all together:

# count files in directory with substring
search="*.sb"
ls -dq "$search" | wc -l

Output:

ls: cannot access *.sb: No such file or directory
0

This implies the string is being stored and retrieved correctly, but the command is not acting as expected. Could anyone explain this phenomenon to me?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 46

Answers (1)

danmohad
danmohad

Reputation: 91

Variable expansion is done before pathname expansion. See here for a similar situation.

Solution in this case: remove the quotation marks

search="*.sb"
ls -dq $search | wc -l

Upvotes: 1

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