Forward slash in Bash on Mac

I have this bash(version 3.2 on MacOS) function

rtf(){
    local filter=${1//*/(.)*};
    local bin="vendor/bin/phpunit --filter="
    local command=$bin"'/"$filter"/i'";

    echo $command;
    $command;
}

What it’s suppose to do is run phpunit with proper regex, here i am converting * to (.)* and wrapping filter to be case insensitive.

Now

$ rtf test*fail
// results in 
vendor/bin/phpunit --filter='/test(.)*fail/i'

The problem is that parsed command works perfectly fine(matched test cases run), when i run directly at terminal. But it does not when function rtf tries to call it in last line. Somehow phpunit can not find matchings for this.

I can believe that the issue is with forward slash in the $command variable. Can any suggest a fix?

Answer

You should use eval "$command" rather than $command. See following example:

[STEP 101] $ cmd="echo 'foo'"
[STEP 102] $ $cmd
'foo'
[STEP 103] $ eval "$cmd"
foo
[STEP 104] $

And it’s not safe to write rtf test*fail, instead it should be rtf "test*fail" otherwise test*fail will be expanded to filenames if the pattern matches some files.