Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to rename files based on the created/born date of the file. I Have a total of 4000 files that i am trying to do this with and would like it to be log_yyyymmddhh.gz right now the files are maillog.???.gz.

Can anyone point me in the right direction of how to get this done via scipt?

I know how to do it based on the current time however what i need is the created/born time. I have tried to use stat however having a problem formating the date.

Thanks
Paul

So why don't you show us what you did with stat and what your formatting issue is?

Is this what you are looking for?

Code:

for each in `find . -name "*" -type f`
do 
dt=`ls -l $each | awk '{ print $6" "$7" "$8 }'`; 
cnv_dt=`date -d "$dt" +%Y%m%d%H`; 
mv $each maillog_${cnv_dt}.gz; 
done

Thanks for your replys

that does not seam to work for me, I am using OpenBSD So i think in my case i would use date -j for the date. When try that it sais invalid time format

stat gives me below and the date i am looking for is "Nov 17 10:00:06 2009". If i load that into date -h it does not work i am sure because it has "Nov" in it.

4868 21129858 -rw------- 1 root wheel 84642584 186447 "Nov 21 07:16:04 2009" "Nov 17 10:00:06 2009" "Nov 21 14:00:05 2009" 16384 368 0 /var/log/maillog.100.gz

If i run "stat -f "%N %m" /var/log/maillog.100.gz" it will give me "/var/log/maillog.100.gz 1258470006" however not sure how to break apart the "1258470006" into month and day.

The short answer is you can't reliably.
The large majority of file systems do not store file creation dates so there is no way to know when a file was created unless that information is included in the file itself (ex: exif photos). The few file systems I know actually storing the file creation time are BSD/UFS2/st_birthtime, Solaris/ZFS/crtime, Mac OS/HSF+/btime and Linux/Ext4/crtime.
With the other ones, the only timestamps recorded in a file metadata are the last modification and the last access time.
However, if the files you are processing are never modified after their initial creation, the last modification should be pretty close to the creation time (depending on the time spent to write the file), which is what the scripts suggested are doing.