Thanks so much!

Agreed that I should be using jq for parsing Json. I had already read about that (and I think one of the threads that I linked also said the same thing). However I was initially composing and pre-testing the script on a system which didn't have jq installed, and I wasn't sure if the Synology would have it installed or not. Since I didn't have access to the Synolgy to check for sure at the time, I kind of went with the safer option just in case maybe jq isn't widely available and I shouldn't be counting on it. So I went with some plain-text parsing which, in my defense, worked perfectly for my particular situation. In any case, that wasn't related to the error.

Regarding the difference between bin/bash and bin/sh - It certainly sounds like a plausible explanation for the problem I saw, but I was already running it as a script file with "#!/bin/bash" at the top of the script. Not sure if the Synology Task Scheduler honors that or not.

So, assuming that the syntax was correct to begin with, what does the "< <( )" syntax mean in Bash? Just want to understand it. I've seen so many different weird kinds of ways to redirect output in Bash and it's hard to find explanations for any of them. For instance, in my final solution I used "<<<" because I saw that in a different example and it happened to work, but I'm not sure what that means either.

My understanding of redirects is from DOS of course, where a single chevron means redirect and overwrite, and two chevrons means redirect and append, and that's more or less it. I'm not understanding the spaces and triple chevrons.

Thanks!