mjhjmtu

I'm trying to make the Bee movie script pop up in 100 different files using this command. I keep getting this error though when I run it. Am I missing something?

Error: jacob1..100.txt: ambiguous redirect

$ curl -s http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a1/bee-movie-script-transcript-seinfeld.html 
 > jacob1..100.txt

You could use tee. It reads from standard input and writes to standard output and files.

Example:

$ echo foo | tee 1..10.txt
foo

$ ls
10.txt 1.txt 2.txt 3.txt 4.txt 5.txt 6.txt 7.txt 8.txt 9.txt

$ cat *
foo
foo
foo
foo
foo
foo
foo
foo
foo
foo

Also note that with that curl command you would be saving the HTML page instead of the script alone. You'll need to grab whatever is within those <pre> tags, but that's an entirely different question.

You could also break this up into multiple commands since it's easier to understand when you're first starting out. For example:

$ curl -s http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a1/bee-movie-script-transcript-seinfeld.html -O

The above will result in this file being downloaded - bee-movie-script-transcript-seinfeld.html.

$ for i in 001..100; do 
 cp bee-movie-script-transcript-seinfeld.html jacob$i.txt; done

Resulting in these files:

$ ls
bee-movie-script-transcript-seinfeld.html jacob021.txt jacob042.txt jacob063.txt jacob084.txt
jacob001.txt jacob022.txt jacob043.txt jacob064.txt jacob085.txt
jacob002.txt jacob023.txt jacob044.txt jacob065.txt jacob086.txt
jacob003.txt jacob024.txt jacob045.txt jacob066.txt jacob087.txt
jacob004.txt jacob025.txt jacob046.txt jacob067.txt jacob088.txt
jacob005.txt jacob026.txt jacob047.txt jacob068.txt jacob089.txt
jacob006.txt jacob027.txt jacob048.txt jacob069.txt jacob090.txt
jacob007.txt jacob028.txt jacob049.txt jacob070.txt jacob091.txt
jacob008.txt jacob029.txt jacob050.txt jacob071.txt jacob092.txt
jacob009.txt jacob030.txt jacob051.txt jacob072.txt jacob093.txt
jacob010.txt jacob031.txt jacob052.txt jacob073.txt jacob094.txt
jacob011.txt jacob032.txt jacob053.txt jacob074.txt jacob095.txt
jacob012.txt jacob033.txt jacob054.txt jacob075.txt jacob096.txt
jacob013.txt jacob034.txt jacob055.txt jacob076.txt jacob097.txt
jacob014.txt jacob035.txt jacob056.txt jacob077.txt jacob098.txt
jacob015.txt jacob036.txt jacob057.txt jacob078.txt jacob099.txt
jacob016.txt jacob037.txt jacob058.txt jacob079.txt jacob100.txt
jacob017.txt jacob038.txt jacob059.txt jacob080.txt
jacob018.txt jacob039.txt jacob060.txt jacob081.txt
jacob019.txt jacob040.txt jacob061.txt jacob082.txt
jacob020.txt jacob041.txt jacob062.txt jacob083.txt

You can then delete the original file, rm -f bee-movie-script-transcript-seinfeld.html.