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    Learnt a lot from this answer. Thanks. I really boiled this question down for simplicity. I am actually trying to loop through files in a directory with some wildcard matching, in a script that must work in bash and zsh. I'll post that as a separate question. Commented Aug 8, 2018 at 20:22
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    @BruceJohnson unix.stackexchange.com/questions/38172/… Commented Aug 8, 2018 at 20:51
  • In the file pattern example, isnt that glob expanded and assigned to file_pattern by bash? Before it ever gets expanded by $file_pattern? Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 1:38
  • @D.BenKnoble, no. Try f=*; echo "$f" in bash. That's an assignment to a scalar variable, which can contain only one value. You'd need f=(*) as shown, that is do an array variable assignment for a variable to contain any number of values. Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 5:59