Hello, I'm trying to write a simple bash backup script. It works....well, sort of and that's why I'm here.

Basic scenario. I want to perform an incremental backup where I check the last time a backup was completed. To do this, I have a reference text file ($LastBackup) that has one line, a date. So here are the lines in question.

tar --newer=$(cat $LastBackup) -cjf BackupFile.tar.gz2 $BackupDirectory
echo $(date +%m/%d/%Y) > $LastBackup

The idea here is to run the tar command and then update the the time in the $LastBackup file. Now, if I run it this way, all I get in my tar file is the directory structure. The strange thing is, if I remove the second line (echo ....), then the script works fine meaning that the newer files get tar'ed. It's as if the echo line runs before the tar line which doesn't make any sense to me.

Thanks for any help.

-Sal

The "--newer" doens't take a date-string as an argument, but it takes a file-name. "tar" will then take the modify-time. So you should use "--newer $LastBackup" instead.

Also, to make incremental backups, tar provides another way. See: info tar "Inc Dumps".

Hmmmm, I tried it with a date string at the command prompt and it worked.

Anyway, I'll lookup your suggestion. Thanks!

Well, here's what I failed to indicate in my message. I have a list of directories that I'm backing up so I loop through them saving each to it's own file. Unfortunately, I was updating $LastBackup each time so after the first directory nothing would be backed up. As it turns out, I only had new data in my 2nd directory so I didn't expect anything more than the directory structure in the first directory.