Originally Posted by Don Cragun

I don't understand what you're trying to do. I get that at sometime shortly before midnight on August 23, 2016 you will have 24 files matching the pattern Report.D230816.T??????.CTLR, 24 files matching the pattern Report.D230816.T??????.ACCD, 24 files matching the pattern Report.D230816.T??????.BCCD, 24 files matching the pattern Report.D230816.T??????.CCCD, and 24 files matching the pattern Report.D230816.T??????.DDDD.

And I get that you want to copy the contents of the 24 files matching the pattern Report.D230816.T??????.CTLR into a file named Test.dat. I don't know what "and so on" means? Are you saying that you want to overwrite that file four times so at that at midnight on the morning of August 24, 2016, the file Test.dat will contain the contents of the 24 files matching the pattern Report.D230816.T??????.DDDD? This doesn't make any sense to me, but that seems to be what you are requesting.

And, you say that the script you are writing can't have the strings CTLR, ACCD, BCCD, CCCD, and DDDD built in. Is this because some days may have additional filename extensions? Is it because the set of filename extensions changes from day to day? Are all of the extensions you want to process four characters long? If not, how do we determine which files are supposed to be processed? (And, if the *.CTLR files are supposed to be processed before the *.ACCD files (i.e., not in alphabetic order), if the extensions aren't built into the script, how is the script supposed to know which extension should be processed first?

Originally Posted by vgersh99

something along these lines assuming you're in the directory where the files are located - not tested...

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

today=$(date +%d%m%y)

ls -1 Report.D${today}* | awk -F. '
{ a[$NF]}
END {for (i in a) print i}
' | while read ext junk
do
   cat Report.D${today}*.${ext} > DailyReport.D${today}.${ext}
done