Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,
Thank you in advance for helping a newbie who is having great trouble with this simple task.

I'm allowed to copy one file remotely each night due to bandwidth restrictions.
A new file gets generated once a day, and I need to copy the previous day's file.

Here is what I'd like to do:
write a program that gets fired off from a listing in the crontab file:
1) detect/calculate the day of the year (example: Feb 28 = day 59).
2) Append the day of year onto a file name (example: big_file_169.data)
3) Do a remote copy using scp or rsync or something.

and that's it.
I'm using a bash shell but can switch to a tshell if that helps.

Thanks again in advance.
Tom

About your first question:
- You can use Python, Ruby, Perl with CPAN DateTime module or GNU date with "%j" specifier - simple.
- Or you can use pure Perl or bash date arithmetic functions (search them in Google) - harder.
- Or you can just use date with "+%d-%m-%Y" specifier - very simple and a standard solution for this kind of problems.