preventing wildcard expansion in bash script -

i've searched here, still can't find answer globbing problems.

we have files "file.1" through "file.5", , each 1 should contain string "completed" if our overnight processing went ok.

i figure it's thing first check there files, want grep them see if find 5 "completed" strings. following innocent approach doesn't work:

files="/mydir/file.*" if [ -f "$files" ];     count=`grep completed $files`     if [ $count -eq 5 ];         echo "found 5" else     echo "no files?" fi 

thanks advice....lyle

per http://mywiki.wooledge.org/bashfaq/004, best approach counting files use array (with nullglob option set):

shopt -s nullglob files=( /mydir/files.* ) count=${#files[@]} 

if want collect names of files, can (assuming gnu grep):

completed_files=() while ifs='' read -r -d '' filename;   completed_files+=( "$filename" ) done < <(grep -l -z completed /dev/null files.*) (( ${#completed_files[@]} == 5 )) && echo "exactly 5 files completed" 

this approach verbose, guaranteed work highly unusual filenames.