Getting an ambiguous redirect error

Question

The following line in my Bash script   echo  AAAA        DDDD            MOL TAG   gt  gt     OUPUT RESULTS    gives me this error    line 46    OUPUT RESULTS   ambiguous redirect   Why

User · Answer

Does the path specified in   OUPUT RESULTS  contain any whitespace characters  If so  you may want to consider using      gt  gt     OUPUT RESULTS    using quotes     You may  also want to consider renaming your variable to   OUTPUT RESULTS

User · Answer

Do you have a variable named OUPUT RESULTS or is it the more likely OUTPUT RESULTS     michael isolde   junk  ABC junk txt michael isolde   junk  echo  Booger   gt   ABC michael isolde   junk  echo  Booger   gt  gt   ABB bash   ABB  ambiguous redirect michael isolde   junk

User · Answer

if you are using a variable name in the shell command  you must concatenate it with   sign   for example    if you have two files  and you are not going to hard code the file name  instead you want to use the variable name   input txt    x   output txt    y     then   shell command within quotes    x     y    it will work this way especially if you are using this inside a python program with os system command probably

User · Answer

I got this error when trying to use brace expansion to write output to multiple files    for example  echo  text   gt   f1 f2  txt results in -bash   f1 f2  txt  ambiguous redirect  In this case  use tee to output to multiple files   echo  text    tee  f1 f2     fn  txt 1 gt  dev null   the 1 gt  dev null will prevent the text from being written to stdout  If you want to append to the file s  use tee -a

User · Answer

put quotes around your variable  If it happens to have spaces  it will give you  ambiguous redirect  as well  also check your spelling  echo  AAAA        DDDD            MOL TAG   gt  gt      OUPUT RESULTS     eg of ambiguous redirect    var  file with spaces    echo  AAAA        DDDD            MOL TAG  gt  gt    var  bash    var   ambiguous redirect   echo  AAAA        DDDD            MOL TAG  gt  gt     var     cat file  with  spaces aaaa     dddd         mol tag

User · Answer

If your script s redirect contains a variable  and the script body defines that variable in a section enclosed by parenthesis  you will get the  ambiguous redirect  error  Here s a reproducible example    vim a sh to create the script edit script to contain  logit   home ubuntu test log   amp  amp  echo  a    gt  gt    logit  chmod  x a sh to make it executable a sh   If you do this  you will get   home ubuntu a sh  line 1   logit  ambiguous redirect   This is because       Placing a list of commands between parentheses causes a subshell to   be created  and each of the commands in list to be executed in that   subshell  without removing non-exported variables  Since the list is   executed in a subshell  variable assignments do not remain in effect   after the subshell completes      From Using parenthesis to group and expand expressions  To correct this  you can modify the script in step 2 to define the variable outside the parenthesis  logit   home ubuntu test log   amp  amp   echo  a    gt  gt   logit

User · Answer

One other thing that can cause  ambiguous redirect  is  t  n  r in the variable name you are writing too  Maybe not  n r  But err on the side of caution  Try this   echo  a   gt    output name      t n r      I got hit with this one while parsing HTML  Tabs  t at the beginning of the line

User · Answer

This might be the case too    you have not specified the file in a variable and redirecting output to it  then bash will throw this error    files  ls  out file    path to output file t for i in  echo   files    do     content  cat  i       echo    content     i    gt  gt    out file  done   out file variable is not set up correctly so keep an eye on this too   BTW this code is printing all the content and its filename on the console

User · Answer

I just had this error in a bash script  The issue was an accidental   at the end of the previous line that was giving an error

User · Answer

I ve recently found that blanks in the name of the redirect file will cause the  ambiguous redirect  message   For example if you redirect to application  date   Y m d k M S  log and you specify the wrong formatting characters  the redirect will fail before 10 AM for example  If however  you used application  date   Y m d H M S  log it would succeed  This is because the  k format yields   9  for 9AM where  H yields  09  for 9AM   echo   date   Y m d k M S  gives 20140626 95138  echo   date   Y m d H M S  gives 20140626095138  The erroneous date might give something like   echo  a   gt  myapp20140626 95138 log   where the following is what would be desired   echo  a   gt  myapp20140626095138 log

User · Answer

Bash can be pretty obtuse sometimes   The following commands all return different error messages for basically the same error     echo hello  gt  bash  syntax error near unexpected token  newline     echo hello  gt    NONEXISTENT  bash    NONEXISTENT   ambiguous redirect    echo hello  gt     NONEXISTENT   bash    No such file or directory   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

[bash] Getting an "ambiguous redirect" error

Examples related to bash