Hi guys.. not strong at script coding.. figure this may be simple

right now i login to the server every night and dumb the mysql database to a backup file. then i go in and delete the oldest one. client only wants say the last 10 or so kept.


Curious what would be required to write a quick little script that I can crontab to do this nightly without any personal involvment from me.


it would have to run the command line i have saved to dump the db.

I would need to know:

A) what to replace the filename with in my dump command

B) how to have the script delete any old files so that I only have about 10 in the folder at any time.


Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Just have your cron job execute something like (NOTE: the following is not necessarily good practice due to hardcoding the password value):

and configure logrotate to, everyday, rotate the backups, keeping only 10.

That's what I'd do as a quick and dirty solution, anyway.

From: Farzan J Mufti July 11, 2012

The way you are trying to do is to write a script that would run as a cron job.

To delete old files you can certainly use find command. To give you a more comprehensive command I would need more information, however. You can look into the man pages by issuing command
man find

The above should take care of (B).

For (A), if you need the latest file, you can run command in your script like
LATEST_FILE=$(ls -lrt | tail -1 | awk '{print $NF;}')

Now you can use this variable in your dump command.

Hope this helps.

You may want to check out the following mysql backup script, it possibly the best open source script available, with lots of options included.

automysqlbackup/