BASH: the dateandtimestamp on files

espiesior · 04-08-2007, 07:05 PM

Can any BASH scripter here help me?

I need to rename a file by its date and time of creation (up to seconds). What is the best method of doing this with BASH script.

The format of the date and time (to seconds) in the filename could be anything that a human can recognize.

example

datetimeoffilecreation = getdatetimeofcreation( file )
mv file datetimeoffilecreation

example
/home/file
/home/08-04-07-21-04-59 #DD-MM-YY-HH-MM-SS

cfaj · 04-08-2007, 08:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by espiesior

Can any BASH scripter here help me?

I need to rename a file by its date and time of creation (up to seconds). What is the best method of doing this with BASH script.

You usually cannot get the time of a file's creation; it is not stored on most UNIX systems. What you can get is the time of the last modification.

Quote:

The format of the date and time (to seconds) in the filename could be anything that a human can recognize.

example

datetimeoffilecreation = getdatetimeofcreation( file )
mv file datetimeoffilecreation

example
/home/file
/home/08-04-07-21-04-59 #DD-MM-YY-HH-MM-SS

If you have GNU date (which is standard in GNU/Linuz systems and may be installed as gdate on some other systems) you can generate the date of the file in whatever format you choose (I recommend a slightly modified ISO format, as in this example):
Code:
filetime=$( date -r "$file" +%Y-%m-%d_%H.%M.%s )
mv "$file" "$filetime"

espiesior · 04-08-2007, 09:07 PM

Thank you very much! It all works except for the seconds and I got that to work by changing %s to %S.