Hi everyone,

I am writting a sh script to automatically copy my log files to another location and then clear the old ones.

the problem is that I dont want these scripts to overwrite each other so i need to add the date to the filename

the command I am using looks like this:
cp access.log history/access_$DATE.log (i have cut out the complete path)

but i want to be able to import the date information from a text file.. (or even better have the script discover the date for itself)

at the moment i have the command

date -d, --date= +%Y%m%d > date.txt

which works fine... however i dont know how to get the SH script to read the information from that file

any idea?

at the moment i have the DATE="date.txt"

which leave the filename access_date.txt.log

Thanks
Chris

From within your shell script you can do this:

DATE="`date"+%Y%m%d"`"

If you want to use an outside file to get information inside your script (will use your date.txt for the example):

DATE="`cat /full/path/to/date.txt`"

This only gets the expected results if there is only 1 line of data in the date.txt file.

Hope this helps.