How can I append wildcards to a variable?

Mattmerk wrote:

Let me make it simpler:

How can I append a string to another string so they can be interpreted as a file path in zsh?

Here is an example of two ways to create strings from other strings:

#!/bin/zsh
string1="$HOME"
string2="Music"
ls "$string1/$string2"
string3=$string1
string3+="/"
string3+=$string2
ls "$string3"

There’s nothing particularly special about paths in this context, other than that the shell has some string-handling features (zsh calls these modifiers) to make parsing those paths easier.

Here’s a writeup on string handling in zsh, including some of : modifier stuff that makes path handling easier.

https://flyingmb.com/2022/07/07/zsh-development-guide-part-2-common-operations-for-string-processing/

The canonical source of zsh documentation:

https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/zsh_toc.html

Apple has a nice shell scripting primer available, though it’s older (bash-ish) and hasn’t seen active updates.

Shell Script Basics

Use find -iname “*.whatever” to locate the files (BTW: double vertical quotes are usually best around paths and patterns), and with xargs on the same find command to execute an mv move.

This approach is strictly using bash or zsh scripting, with no Automator involvement. Or the script is invoked from an Automator app, if that’s needed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13899746/use-xargs-to-mv-a-directory-from-find-results-into-another-directory#13899794

Post the intended “from” paths and the intended “to” paths, please.

Or we can go the other way, and discuss globbing and wildcards.

I’d also suggest simplifying the example for the purposes of discussion, as your /this/that/the/other/thing/more/something_somethingelse.thisandthat path is just adding more text to sift through, to what is already a whole lot of text.

For example: ~/tmp/this.that

But as it seems Automator is a hard requirement here (and FWIW, xargs inserts the matching filename into the command or script to be executed, sans wildcards), I’ll bow out of the discussion.