Ambiguous redirect when redirecting to multiple files using Bash

Question

$ echo "" >  /home/jem/rep_0[1-3]/logs/SystemOut.log
bash: /home/jem/rep_0[1-3]/logs/SystemOut.log: ambiguous redirect

Can I redirect to multiple files at a time?

Edit: Any answer that allows use of the ambiguous file reference?

Answer 1

That's what tee is for:

command | tee file1 file2 file3 > file4

tee also outputs to stdout, so you may want either to put one file after a redirect (as shown above), or send stdout to /dev/null.

For your case:

echo "" | tee /home/jem/rep_0[1-3]/logs/SystemOut.log >/dev/null

Answer 2

You can do this using tee, which reads from stdin and writes to stdout and files. Since tee also outputs to stdout, I've chosen to direct it's output to /dev/null. Note that bash expansion matches against the existing files, so the files you're trying to write to must exist before executing this command for it to work.

$ echo "" | tee /home/jem/rep_0[1-3]/logs/SystemOut.log > /dev/null

As a side note, the "" you pass to echo is redundant.

Not directly relevant to your question, but if you don't rely on bash expansion you can have multiple pipes.

$ echo hello > foo > bar > baz
$ cat foo bar baz
hello
hello
hello