hi,

I was going to sit down and write a simple shell script (bash), that once I thought about it wasn't so simple. This will end up in a shared web-hosting enviroment in the end - a user wants to copy log files out of a directory and store them elswhere in his webspace so that they don't get deleted perodicly as they would if left in the log direcotry.

What needs to happen is that each day (cronjob) the file access.log.2006-04-26 and error.log.2006-04-26 needs to get copied elswhere. I thought I'd just use the date command to create the file name, but the problem is that each day the previous log must be copied out. So today, May 1, the Apr 30 log needs to be copied.

My question is how can I set up a script to easly grab these files? there's lots of other files in the folder so I don't want to just grab the entire thing. These two files are the only plain files in the folder - there's other folders and compressed .gz files.

Any sigguestions much apprechated.

would using a wildcard work? as in:

cp *.log.* ../my_new_folder/*.log.*

no, becuase then I'll pick up all of the pervious day's log files that are named access.log.2006-04-25.gz as well. There's abotu 5 days worth of logs stored, as well as data for analog (web-based stats program) and I want to keep the destination clean and free of duplicates.

Thanks for the sigguestion though. I apprechate it.

Something like this might be what your looking for:


#!/bin/bash
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
find /var/log/messages -type f -name "access.log.$DATE.gz" -mtime 1 -exec cp /new/location {} \;
find /var/log/messages -type f -name "error.log.$DATE.gz" -mtime 1 -exec cp /new/location {} \;
exit 0


Just edit the /var/log to the real location of the files and the cp /new location to where you want the files to go

You may need to play around with it a bit, haven't tested it so I'm not too sure if it will work properly, but it may be a start.

Hope this helps

I been looking this over myself and finally come up with what I think you might be after. I am assuming you only want to copy the previous day log like you named above to a new location?

#!/bin/bash
DATE=`date +%F -d "1 days ago"`
cp /var/log/messages/access.log.$DATE.gz /new/location
cp /var/log/messages/error.log.$DATE.gz /new/location
exit 0

Run the command to make sure the date is correct in structure.
date +%F -d "1 days ago"

Change the 1 to a 2 if you want 2 days earlier.

Let me know how it goes. Thanks there fotoguy on the script. I kept messing up the DATE variable. I had it backwards. Not the best at scripting but learning. I was about to resort to the awk and sed commands. I new there must be a simply way.

If it works you can change the cp command to the mv command.
mv /var/log/messages/error.log.$DATE.gz /new/location/error.log.$DATE.gz

Brian1

awasome "1 days ago" thing. I looked all through the manual for date and couldn't fine anything documenting that. It works perfectly, I tested the script, and after fixing my typos it runs without problem. Thanks for all the help!

What is the point of exit 0 at the end of the script? I've never used/seen that before.

Thanks for all the help again!

Glad to help out, I'm only learning as well. Funny that, I was thinking awk, grep and sed myself.

The exit 0 just means the script exits with out any errors, you don't need to have it, the script will exit normally. I just throw it in as a bit of programming standard for myself.

Gald to be of help as well. I made a note of this but not where I found it a while back. I think I found the one I seen this from. http://www.tldp.org/LDP/GNU-Linux-To...calendars.html

Brian1

The common convention on Unix like systems is that programs (inc scripts) exit with value zero if ok, else another positive int if not.
This enables you to check the result via the std lines