ambiguous redirection question.
 

Guys,

I have a simple question.

I am doing two "finds" and first one works fine without any question however for the second one I am getting error like "ambiguous redirect" .

Well this is becoming an interesting thing as the syntax is fine and don't think there is any issue with that.

First find statement.
Second find statement.
So may i know why is the second statement giving us the grief?

Try saying the second one out loud ... I think you will find there is a word missing between each 'not name' combo.

I would also be curious why you want the first asterisk not interpreted but then leave the second raw for the -path argument??

I used 2>&1 | tee -a ${LOGFILE} and error disappeared. I don't think there is any word missing between "-not -name "AA*
as I believe that is what the syntax is? Moreover If I run the same command in shell it works fine except in shellscript.

I could not understand your second question.

I now understood your second question. For path, all I want is all is all those files which match following pattern.
meaning let there any no of directories/files before input and after input directory, I only want those files which are coming after "input" directory. make sense now?

Adding quotes around the variable seems to be a good way to deal with the "ambiguous redirect" message: You tend to get a better message when you've made a typing mistake -- and when the error is due to spaces in the filename, using quotes is the fix.

No. Grail's question was that why you used escape character i.e. \ (backslash) before first asterisk symbol in error, while you didn't escaped the trailing asterist symbol? You did:
Whereas Grail asked that why you didn't do this:
You have just redirected the std error, but error is still there.

However, once invoke command without redirecting it's output to a file, and check where you're getting error:
I doubt, the ambiguous redirect error is because of multiple -not options that you've used. (Though I do not have a Unix system available, so I couldn't verify it).

Check if ${ERR0R_FILES} exists and else first create it. The find command works fine here.

Its not necessory to file ${ERR0R_FILES} already exist. It will be created automatically. Both commands are running fine. So it seems some pb with OP's working shell.

@OP:
Can you once try following, without closing variable name in curly braces, as follow:

My bad on my first point ... it just seemed there should be some and's or or's in between the not's. I am guessing this is somehow implied as an and in this case.

And yes shivaa pointed out my curious question correctly. Personally I would have just used single quotes as escaping gives me the yips.

As was suggested by whizje, the "ambiguous redirect" error is very likely due to the unquoted variable ERROR_FILES containing embedded white space in its value. I can easily reproduce the behavior that way:

I should be more precise in my writing. I meant check if ERROR_FILES contains a value and is not empty.

@grail

I don't think so there is anything missing between -not -name "PQRS*" I believe this is the syntax, anything wrong here?

@whizje

I did try " around the variable name but that didn't worked not sure why.

@shivaa

Why you suggest the original quote without curly brace? normally we use variable in dollar with curly braces right?

Please advise.

Thanks.

@shivaa

So if there is any error, forget about that error how should we capture it? I believe

Captures pretty much any error? I want to capture any error and end the script there and there itself instead of proceeding further.