I have a script that runs daily, creating backups of my MySQL database (Two different tables), along with my web root. Thus, creating three backup files each night.

I would like to have a script that stores weekly backups. I would need to copy the three most recently modified files out of the daily/ dir, into the weekly/ dir (Three files because I have three backup files each night...).

I'm not sure how to accomplish this. I know "ls -t" sorts by modified time. It would be awesome if "find" had a sort and limit option or something, but unfortunately the man page doesn't mention such a feature. mv `ls -t | head -1` weekly/ would work, but that would only copy the first file, not all three.

Thank you for your time and replies.

That's what pipe is for. An alternative to checking access times is to tack the date to the name of the file (e.g. filename-`date +%F`) and sort on the filename suffix.

You can script all kinds of stuff yourself. Then, after a while it gets to the point where you just decide to adopt something that's publicly available. I reached that point a while ago. For MySQL, the Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL does the trick. Then I have Amanda manage backing up those dumps and the web directories. I do it to tape, but you can do it to disk. See the links at http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup .