This one took HOURS and HOURS of my life. Hopefully this post will save someone the same grief.

I am using "-regex" with "find" via a variable. If I echo the command that is constructed, it looks OK. When I paste the echoed text it to the command line it runs fine. But inside the script it generates an error. This led me to the work around which was to pipe the echoed text to bash.

here is the snippet from the script that matters (using GNU bash, version 3.2.33(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) - Fedora 8):

echo find "$FOLDER" -type f $EXCLUDE
find "$FOLDER" -type f $EXCLUDE
echo find "$FOLDER" -type f $EXCLUDE | bash

here is the output from above 3 lines:

find etc -type f -not \( -regex '^etc/X11/.*' -o -regex '^etc/fonts/.*' \)
find: paths must precede expression
Usage: find [-H] [-L] [-P] [path...] [expression]
etc/bla
etc/foo

My question is why does the command not work in the script when it works fine on the command line or when piped to bash?

Precede the name of the directory with a slash: Regards