Control wildcard expansion in sh command - bash

Question

I have a program which executes shell functions using call like sh -c "<command_string>". I can not change the way of calling these functions.
In this program I call different self written helper shell function, which are sourced into my environment. One of these looks like this. It unzips files with a given file pattern into a given directory.
function dwhUnzipFiles() {
declare OPTIND=1
while getopts "P:F:T:" opt; do
case "$opt" in
P) declare FILEPATTERN="$OPTARG" ;;
F) declare FROMDIR="$OPTARG" ;;
T) declare TODIR="$OPTARG" ;;
*) echo "Unbekannte Option | Usage: dwhUnzipFiles -P <filepattern> -F <fromdir> -T <todir>"
esac
done
shift $((OPTIND-1))
for currentfile in "${FROMDIR}"/"${FILEPATTERN}" ; do
unzip -o "$currentfile" -d "${TODIR}";
done
# error handling
# some more stuff
return $?
}
For this function I use arguments with wildcards for the FILEPATTERN variable. The function gets called by my program like this:
sh -c ". ~/dwh_env.sh && dwhUnzipFiles -P ${DWH_FILEPATTERN_MJF_WLTO}.xml.zip -F ${DWH_DIR_SRC_XML_CURR} -T ${DWH_DIR_SRC_XML_CURR}/workDir" where ${DWH_FILEPATTERN_MJF_WLTO} contains wildcards.
This works as intended. My confusion starts with another helper function, which is constructed in a similar way, but I'm not able to control the wildcard expansion correctly. It just deletes files in a directory depending on a given file pattern.
function dwhDeleteFiles() {
declare retFlag=0
declare OPTIND=1
while getopts "D:P:" opt; do
case "$opt" in
D) declare DIRECTORY="$OPTARG" ;;
P) declare FILEPATTERN="$OPTARG" ;;
*) echo "Unbekannte Option | Usage: dwhDeleteFiles -D <Directory> -P <Filepattern>"
esac
done
shift $((OPTIND-1))
for currentfile in "${DIRECTORY}"/"${FILEPATTERN}" ; do
rm -fv "${currentfile}";
done
# error handling
# some more stuff
return $retFlag
}
This function is called like this:
sh -c ". ~/dwh_env.sh && dwhDeleteFiles -P ${DWH_FILEPATTERN_MJF_WLTO}.xml -D ${DWH_DIR_SRC_XML_CURR}/workDir" where again ${DWH_FILEPATTERN_MJF_WLTO} contains wildcards. When I call this function with my program it results in doing nothing. I tried to play around with adding "" and \"\" to the arguments of my functions, but all what is happening is that instead of deleting all files in the given directory the function deletes only the first one in an alphanumerical order.
Can somebody explain to me, what is happening here? My idea is that the multiple passing of the variable, containing the wildcard, is not working. But how do I fix this and is it even possible in bash? And why is the dwhUnzipFilesfunction working and the dwhDeleteFiles is not?

Answer 1

Suppose that DWH_FILEPATTERN_MJF_WLTO is *, and you have a bunch of *.xml files, then the command is
dwhDeleteFiles -P *.xml -D ${DWH_DIR_SRC_XML_CURR}/workDir
which expands to
dwhDeleteFiles -P bar.xml baz.xml foo.xml zap.xml -D ${DWH_DIR_SRC_XML_CURR}/workDir
(Note alphabetical order of xml files). But the -P option only takes one arg, bar.xml (the first) and the remaining are treated as file arguments.
Try setting set -x in your script to see this in action.