Bash Brace Expansion & Variables I have a find command: find Directory/{Alpha,Bravo,Charlie} arg1 arg2 I want to replace `Alpha,Bravo,Charlie` with `$find_dir` find Directory/{$find_dir} arg1 arg2 however the latter expands to find Directory/{Alpha,Bravo,Charlie} arg1 arg2 rather then find Directory/Alpha Directory/Bravo Directory/Charlie arg1 arg2 Why? It's part of a fairly complex bash script that may have more or less directories, not all which are relevant (so globbing Upload/* would not work). So if I setup three now and add another, I'll have to manually add it in later. Plus I need it run from the root of directories to keep finds outputs perspective (./Upload/Dir/file as opposed to ./Dir/file). But using a variable would permit me to change that as needed and keep it relevant to other parts of the script.

From `bash` documentation, Brace Expansion section:

> **Brace expansion is performed before any other expansions, and any characters special to other expansions are preserved in the result**. It is strictly textual. Bash does not apply any syntactic interpretation to the context of the expansion or the text between the braces. To avoid conflicts with parameter expansion, the string ‘${’ is not considered eligible for brace expansion.

Another note, in `bash`:

> The order of expansions is: brace expansion, tilde expansion, parameter, variable, and arithmetic expansion and command substitution **(done in a left-to-right fashion)** , word splitting, and filename expansion.

So in your case, `bash` _saw_ brace expansion before variable expansion, it will do brace expansion first, produce result `{Alpha,Bravo,Charlie}`.

If you can control `$find_dir` variable content, you can use `eval`:


eval "find Directory/{$find_dir} arg1 arg2"