shell glob expansion with spaces

Question

I'd like to write a Posix shell script function that will match on a pattern with both spaces and glob characters (*?) that need to be expanded. In Python, glob.glob('/tmp/hello world*') will return the correct list. How do I do this in the shell?

#!/bin/sh

## this function will list
## all of the files in the /tmp
## directory that match pattern
f() {
  PATTERN="$1"
  ls -1 "/tmp/$PATTERN"
}

touch '/tmp/hello world {1,2,3}.txt'
f 'hello world*'

Answer 1

You can enclose everything except the * in quotes:

ls -l "hello world"*
ls -l "hello world"*".txt"

You can then pass a quoted string to f(). Using the string inside f() will require eval.

#!/bin/sh

## this function will list
## all of the files in the /tmp
## directory that match pattern
f() {
  PATTERN=$1
  eval ls -1 "/tmp/$PATTERN"
}

touch '/tmp/hello world {1,2,3}.txt'
f '"hello world"*'