I am brand new to system administration, being a programmer but have no unix experience. Could you please let me know how to perform this same function but instead of giving arguments at command line to do in aprogram so I could put in as a cron job. Greatly appreciate any responses.

Here is something I have found. Is there any way someone could explain to me in 'english' what the code after 'sed' is doing? Also what doesn maxdepth does, have an error that maxdepth is a bad option.

cd /var/sam/log || exit 1

for i in $(find . -type f -maxdepth 1)
do
filename=$(echo $1 | sed 's?^\./\(.*\)?\1?')
cp -p $i old/$(date +'%Y%m%d').$filename
> $i
done
exit 0