Hey guys,

I hope this is on the right forum, if not, please excuse me.

I am busy learning shell scripting, and I managed to get my first few right, but now I am trying to do something that I know how to do in Windows, but not in Linux. Basically, during a file copy, I want to create a new date for each folder on a daily basis to copy backups into.

so, in windows the syntax would be "xcopy %systemroot%\backups\blah.blah \\servername\backups\%date%"

in linux I am running a "cp blah.gz /mount/blah" I want to create a folder with the date based on the current date.

anyone know how to get the same right in shell script? I am new to linux environment variables, so this question may be a tad lame for some, any help would be appreciated however.


thanks in advance
B

Essentially mkdir "$(date)" but you probably want to use some date command options to get a directory name you like the look of, maybe with a format so there are no spaces in the name. The double quotes keep the output of the date command as a single word, in case there are spaces in the date output.

EDIT

If you want the script to know the directory name then something like this
dir="/mount/blah/$(date)"
mkdir "$dir"
cp blah.gz "$dir"

You may find these useful
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Using tar is another option. It is the native Linux backup tool and will preserve ownership and permissions. I you copy to a Windows share, these would be lost.

thank you both. I think I understand it now. it's just the formatting of the output I gotta get right, but I think I should get it.
thanks for your help again.

I use tar and gzip to create my source files during the backup. it's after I have created them that I am copying them via a cifs mount point to a Windows box.
the files in the tar and gzip should retain their permissions as long as they are still in the archive, is that right?

aaah, OK, got it!!!

export foldername=`date +%Y%m%d`
mkdir /mount/blah/$foldername




whhoooooop!!!

thanks everyone for your help.

Correct. You may need to pay attention to security attributes as well, although this is more likely important if you are backing up all the files on a computer. The `star' program may be what you are looking for in this case.

Also scan through the info manual for tar. It has some examples, such as piping the archived tar stream output to a subshell where it is extracted. This could be used to copy a large directory tree to another drive or if using ssh, to a drive on another machine on the internet.

Also look at section 5.2 for performing incremental dumps.

That works but there is no need for the export. The export command makes the named variable an environmental variable, meaning it is part of the process environment and thus available to sub-processes.

thank you both again. That is valuable information.

Right but they are by numeric UID and GID not by username and groupname so they will only be restored to the original users and groups if the username/UID are the same in /etc/passwd and the groupname/GID are the same in /etc/group on the system where you restore as they were on the system where you backed up.