[ILUG] Shell quoting mystery

[Lars Hecking]

 bash 2.05b.1(1) on RHEL3.

 I have a script that builds a search expression for find and then runs
 find. For some reason, an expression which includes "*" gets quoted
 with single quotes and therefore literally looks for 'foo.*' instead
 of all foo.*.

FINDRX_C="-name core.\* -o -name core"
FINDRX="${FINDRX_C}${FINDRX_N}${FINDRX_X}"
...
find ${d} -type d -name .snapshot -prune -o -type f \( $FINDRX \)`
...

 becomes
sh -x ...
...
+ FINDRX=-name core.\* -o -name core
++ find /home -type d -name .snapshot -prune -o -type f '(' -name 'core.\*' -o -name core ')'

 I tried all sorts of quoting tricks, but can't get rid of the single quotes
 surrounding core.\*. Any ideas?