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?
>Solution :
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