I was suggesting that you could change:

Code:

comp=$(date "+Completed.%Y%m%d")

in the first set of changes suggested in message sequence #8 in this thread to:

Code:

comp=${1:-$(date "+Completed.%Y%m%d")}

Then it will behave exactly as it did before if you invoke your backup shell script with no arguments. I don't know the name of your script, but for this discussion, suppose that it is called backupdbs. If you issued the command:

Code:

backupdbs

late last night, it would have created Completed.20120926 as the list of successfully completed backups. If you looked at the log files this morning and found that one or more backups failed, you could use the command:

Code:

backupdbs Completed.20120926

to use the list created last night instead of creating a new file for today (Completed.20120927).

In case someone is reading this doesn't understand the command:

Code:

comp=${1:-$(date "+Completed.%Y%m%d")}

It sets the the variable comp to $1 (the 1st argument to yoiur shell script) if that argument is set and is not an empty string; otherwise, it expands $(date "+Completed.%Y%m%d") and sets comp to that value (i.e., Completed.YYYYMMDD where YYYY is the current year, MM is the current two-digit month, and DD is the current two-digit day within the current month).

If you don't like my proposed naming convention for the list of successfully completed backups, change $(date "+Completed.%Y%m%d") to whatever you want. Or just make up a new name every day and always invoke your shell script with that name as its operand. (Just be sure that the name you choose doesn't contain any whitespace characters nor any characters that would be treated specially by your shell such as *, ?, $, etc.)