To duplicate, please create a file "bug.txt" in ~tmp,

   echo "line one" > ~/tmp/bug.txt

then run the following code -

In the code below, *please replace my full path "/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt" with your full path. There seems to be an unrelated issue trying to list ~/tmp/bug.txt*

  for file in (list "/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt") {
                  type-of $file
                  echo "file=$file";
                  # Create a variable. The back and forth between .log and .txt is
                  # only there to simulate some useful work to set value of samefile
                  export samefile="${echo $file(:s/.txt/.log/)}"(:s/.log/.txt/);
                  echo "samefile=$samefile"
                  # Note that on my system, 'which tail' ==> /usr/bin/tail
                  tail $file
                  # Note that on my system, 'which cat' ==> eshell/cat is a byte-compiled Lisp function in ‘em-unix.el’.
                  # cat $file
                  echo "samefile=$samefile"
                  echo "file=$file";
              }

Actual result:

================
string
file=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt
samefile=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt
line one
samefile=nil
file=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt
================

Please *note how the contents of samefile is nullified. This is the bug I am reporting here*

Expected result:
================
string
file=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt
samefile=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt
line one
samefile=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt
file=/home/mzimmermann/tmp/bug.txt
================

Notes:

1. I tried this with other non-lisp functions (/usr/bin/gzip) and it caused the same issue.

2. If we use "cat" which is an elisp function, the loop works as expected.

Thanks, 

Milan Zimmermann