Bash: Expand braces and globs with spaces in filenames?

To perform brace expansion and globbing on a path with spaces, you can quote the portions of the path that contain spaces, e.g.

mycmd '/path/with spaces/'{a,b,c}/*.gz

Doing brace expansion using a list of values from a variable is a little tricky since brace expansion is done before any other expansion. I don't see any way but to use the dreaded eval.

eval mycmd "'/path/with spaces/'{a,b,c}/*.gz"

P.S. In such a case however, I would personally opt for a loop to build the argument list rather than the approach shown above. While more verbose, a loop will be a lot easier to read for the uninitiated and will avoid the need to use eval (especially when the expansion candidates are derived from user input!).

Proof of concept:

Using a dummy command (x.sh) which prints out the number of arguments and prints out each argument:

[me@home]$ shopt -s nullglob  # handle case where globbing returns no match[me@home]$ ./x.sh 'path with space'/{a,b}/*.txtNumber of arguments = 3- path with space/a/1.txt- path with space/b/2.txt- path with space/b/3.txt[me@home]:~/temp$ dirs="a,b"[me@home]k:~/temp$ eval ./x.sh "'path with space'/{$dirs}/*.txt"Number of arguments = 3- path with space/a/1.txt- path with space/b/2.txt- path with space/b/3.txt

Okay, so here is one using bash for the "braces" and find for the globs:

find "${dirs[@]/#//path/with spaces/}" -name '*.gz' -print0 | xargs -0 mycmd

Useful with this if you need the results in an array.

Here's one for the GNU Parallel fans:

parallel -Xj1 mycmd {}/*.gz ::: "${dirs[@]/#//path/with spaces/}"