I'm trying to pass a single stream of `zcat` output into a bash pipeline. Let's use `wc -l` as my pipeline for this example.

```
zcat -f /var/log/log.3.gz /var/log/log.2.gz /var/log/log.1.gz /var/log/log | wc -l

```

actually returns the number of lines.

```
paths="/var/log/log.3.gz /var/log/log.2.gz /var/log/log.1.gz /var/log/log"
zcat -f "${paths}" | wc -l

```

> 
> gzip: /var/log/log.3.gz /var/log/log.2.gz /var/log/log.1.gz
> /var/log/log.gz: No such file or directory
> 
> 
> 

How can I combine all of these files to stdout so that my pipeline only makes one pass without intermediate files? My attempt at passing the entire string results in `.gz` appended to the variable as if thats the single argument