I found a solution to my particular problem. I can quote the dir, and then
remove the quoting of the spaces afterwards.

myfiles() {
    emulate -L zsh
    setopt LOCAL_OPTIONS EXTENDED_GLOB

    local dir="${(q)1:a}/"

    dir=${dir/\\\ / }

    local filepattern="${dir}**/*"

    print -c ${~filepattern}
}

I realize this could brake on even more exotic file names, but for now I'm
happy with this solution.


On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:21 PM, Jesper Nygårds <jesper.nygards@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:00 PM, Peter Stephenson <p.stephenson@samsung.com
> > wrote:
>
>> $dir contains a straight string with unquoted parentheses.  The
>> ~filepattern then turns those parentheses into pattern characters.
>>
>> Yes, I understand.
>
>
>> I'm not sure why you want filepattern anyway, but
>>
>> I tried to simplify my function to make my problem obvious. In my "real"
> function, I am collecting several function arguments into a combined
> pattern, which is why I need to use this indirect method.
>
> local filepattern="**/*"
>
>> print -c ${dir}${~filepattern}
>>
>> ought to work.  Otherwise you'll need to quote metacharacters in dir,
>> which is possible but should be unnecessary.
>>
>
> Yes, but as my second example demonstrates: if I quote my filepattern, it
> then doesn't work for files with spaces in their names. I was hoping for a
> solution where it would be possible to get this to work for both situations.
>
>
>