I need to compare two different versions of a source tree excluding certain directories and print out some statistics on the files which have been changed, removed or added. Here comes a boiled down example of the problem I'm having. Let's say there are 4 files in the current directory: ./aa ./aaa ./bb ./bbb and I want to exclude all paths starting with ./bb This one is easy: find . ! -path './bb*' Now I want to make it into a generic script: DIR=. OPT='! -path $DIR/bb*' find $DIR $OPT $DIR and * within OPT are essential and no matter what I've tried I can't get the parameter expansion right. Any suggestions will be appreciated,I couldn't get * to expand later either. Backslashes didn't help. What I finally did was like: opt1='! -path $dir/bb<wild>' opt = `echo $opt1 | sed 's|<wild>|*|'` find $dir $opt
Hi Tony, Actually I was trying to achieve just the opposite: to prevent * expansion. And the only solution I've found so far was to explicitly forbid pathname expansion with shell -f option: DIR=. OPT='! -path '$DIR'/bb*' set -f find $DIR $OPT
