On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 08:03:09PM -0500, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> By using wordexp, Adam suggests
> 
> > "posix shell" or words to that effect and then it becomes fairly clear
> 
> Clear? Really? To you and me maybe. Bash does so many crazy things
> at the shell ... arithmetic, regexp substitution,
> and tries to interpret so many characters as something,
> I really don't want to go there.
> I should be able to call up a file called $phones/at&t
> without having to think about it.

Ok, a couple of things:
wordexp is posix *not* bash. There's an important difference in that it
doesn't do as many crazy substitutions as bash does.
Also we can switch off the command substitution feature which makes things a
little simpler.

In addition, we need to standardise the escape character I think if we use glob as otherwise we're going to have ` for some things and \ for others, that's just a mess.
If you really want to keep your hand-rolled env var expansion,
then we definitely need the ${var} syntax,
and probably the \ as escape character to work with the glob call.

Cheers,
Adam.