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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> Quoting inhibits both word splitting and wildcard expansion, for variables and command substitutions.

The result of a variable substitution isn't subject to wilcard expansion, whether quoted or not.

If your only reason to quote "$foo" is because you think foo expands to a globbing pattern, and no other reason is justified, you can drop the quotes.

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It is subject to wildcard expansion. You can verify this with

    var="/*"; echo $var

Ooops, you're right! I somehow mixed this up with special contexts.

  case $var in
  '*' )
    echo asterisk ;;
  esac

But wildcard expansion is suppressed there unconditionally. Same as in assignment context: other=$var.

those both suppress word splitting too.

what the balls are you talking about?

    $ touch bad; a='*'; echo $a
    bad

I tested with shbot and this is the case in at least original bourne sh, ksh, mksh, dash, bash 1, and bash 4.4.

Indeed; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17070872

I'd erase my hasty comment if I could. I'm just praying it gets downvoted to invisibility now.

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