Question

I have an environment variable called $TEST which refers to a directory in my bash script I have a variable called $VARTEST which is $TEST/dir/file

now I want to grep the file specified by $VARTEST so I try to do:
grep somestring $VARTEST but it doesn’t translate $TEST into it’s directory

I’ve tried different combinations of {}, '' and '' but without success

Answer 1

I think you want

eval grep somestring '$VARTEST' 

or even

VARTEST_EVALUATED=$(eval echo $VARTEST) grep '$SOMESTRING' '$VARTEST_EVALUATED' 

but remember (as others already said): If possible use

VARTEST='$TEST/foo/bar' 

instead of

VARTEST='$TEST/foo/bar' 

use the second one only if you really need kind of ‘lazy evaluation’…

Warning, this could be dangerous if $VARTEST contains malicous code.