All,

I have just installed a new syslog server running Red Hat Enterprise Server 4. I've managed to get my firewalls to send their syslog information to this server and it's being logged to /var/log/firewall.log.

I have the following criteria I need to meet and am having some issues.

1. Back the file up hourly with the date and time automatically appended to the file name ex. 09132005_100000_firewall.log (or something like that) and copy it to /var/log/firewall. Create new firewall.log file. Repeat once per hour.

2. Once per day at midnight compress all 24 files into /var/log/firewall/backup/ with the filename being just the date.

This is something I very easily accomplished under Windows, but am having problems getting the command line context for appending date and time to the filename. Under Windows its something along the lines of %date%time.txt.

Any help greately appreciated.

Mac

Take a look at Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO which should be on your system somewhere (like /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs) or at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html

In particular, the sections that mention a "Simple backup script".

Thanks, I'll go through that and see what I can learn.

Mac

All,

I've found a nice and each way to accomplish the first part.

mv filename "`date +%Y%m%d_%H`_filename"

Any ideas on part two?

Mac

This may get you started....

minute (0-59),
hour (0-23),
day of the month (1-31),
month of the year (1-12),
day of the week (0-6 with 0=Sunday).

Edit your crontab
Fix the time and date positions to what you want.
* * * * * /mnt/backup/backup.job

homey,

Thanks a lot for the assist! I'll keep plugging away at it and will post the final solution for you guys to review.

Mac

You're welcome!