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.

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
}

You mean something like

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

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.