Shell Programming and Scripting

I was needing a script that basically covers my butt, lol. I have the nasty habit of making many changes without backing up files, and then after a ton of changes, if I have to go back to the original version, it makes it harder to go back.

Now, I have a script that takes a file, renames it to filename.bak.datestamp, but I was wondering how I would go about making a combination script.

I use vi to edit most files, so I'd like to use an alias 'vib'. I'd like to be able to use it in this way:

vib filename.txt

I'd like it to call a script that first runs the backup script, then runs the vi command.

Anyone done this before?

Well.. I am not able to test it right now, but something like this should suffice.

Code:

function vib() {
    if [ -z $1 ]; then
        echo "You must supply a filename to modify.";
        echo "Syntax is: vib filename";
        exit;
    fi
    if [ ! -z $1 ]; then
        cp -v $1 /home/username/pathtobackupdir/$1.bak.`date +%Y%m%d`
        vi $1
    fi
}

Let me know how it works out! Of course, change the path to the backup directory.

You mean something like

Code:

for file in "$*"
do
    cp ${file} ${file}.`date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S`
done
vi "$*"

Personally, I rather prefer svn (or any other RCS) over the copy-backup method for such things.

Works perfectly.

I might have used the first posters, but the server is pretty consolidated, with different backup directories for different applications, so it would have gotten much more complicated to work all that into it.