Linux command ambiguous redirect

Question

Hi I have a lab header called header.txt and I want to cat into my 3 C files cat ../header.txt > find -name *.c

What is wrong with the above statement?

Answer 1

Output redirection is for files, not commands. You'll need to process each file separately.

find -name *.c -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' f; do
  cat ../header.txt >> $f   # Append instead of overwriting
done

As for the 'ambiguous redirect', you normally get that when you write something like:

... > *.c

and the glob *.c expands to more than one file. For example:

$ echo "" >> *.c
-sh: *.c: ambiguous redirect
$