Executing commands containing quoted strings produced by command substitution can be tricky. You can easily see the problem if you use set commands to turn tracing on and off around the command substitution in your code:

Code:

set -xv
Find_File2Exclude=`find ${paths[$k]} -maxdepth 1 -type f \( $exclude \) -printf '%t %p\n' | sort -k 1 -n | head -n 1 | cut -d'/' -f3`
set +xv

which clearly shows that you end up with double-quoted single-quoted strings for your patterns containing wildcard such as "'*.log'" which causes find to look for filenames containing literal single-quote characters.

If all of the following are true:then the following replacement for your non-working code snippet may work:

Code:

[ -d "$HOME/_empty_dir" ] || mkdir "$HOME/_empty_dir" || exit 1
cd "$HOME/_empty_dir"
exclude="out log cps suc dat"
cmd="find ${paths[$k]} -maxdepth 1 -type f $(printf '! -iname *.%s ' $exclude) -printf"
Find_File2Exclude=$($cmd '%t %p\n' | sort -k1,1n | head -n 1 | cut -d'/' -f3)
cd - > /dev/null
rmdir "$HOME/_empty_dir"
printf '%s\n' "$Find_File2Exclude"

Note that I could not test this exact code on my system because the find utility on my system does not recognize the -maxdepth, -iname, and -printf primaries. But, similar constructs have been successfully tested with both bash and ksh.