Answer by l0b0 for How to enter foo-* folder without actually using wildcard or shell expansions?

Based on the final requirement you don't need cd; you can do the following:

find . -type d -name 'foo-*' -exec make -C {} ';'

and

find . -type d -name 'foo-*' -exec phing -f {}/build.xml ';'

The asterisks are handled by find internally, and I believe this is POSIX compatible.