[apaddobs]

Hi,

Within my shell script (#!/bin/sh), when I have
$cmd > a.log 2>&1 &

this does kick off a job in the background.

On the command line, when I run
$cmd > > a.log 2>&1 &
Ambiguous output redirect.

Why is that?

[no2pencil]

You have two redirects next to each other in your line of code.

You have cmd, output to, output to, a.log.

[apaddobs]

Not sure how this works fine through my shell script. Is it that the shell script is ignoring the second one?

So how do i get the stdout output to a.log, run it as a background process and stderr to say /dev/null?
cmd >& a.log < /dev/null &

[no2pencil]

The "/dev/null 2>&1" tells the shell to send standard output & standard error to /dev/null, which is a file & basically means don't show output or errors. Now, you can't redirect standard output to both a.log & to /dev/null.

Can you further describe what you are trying to do?