Shell Programming and Scripting

we want to backup all opened files by vi before editing also with version information. i wrote below alias to backup crontab file content with version info. What i want know is to make this opened files by vi. We want to prevent user mistakes by adding this alias.

alias crontab='DATE=$(date +"%Y%m%d%H%M");cp /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root.bck$DATE;crontab'

Thanks,
regards.

I guess vim (Vi IMproved) has an option to take backup or incremental backup when editing a file.

Something like this might help:-

Code:

print ":w .profile.`date +%s`" > /tmp/$$ ; vim -s /tmp/$$ .profile;rm /tmp/$$

It might be fun getting it into an alias though. It also only works on a single file. I suppose you could write it as a shell script and put in a loop, calling your shell script in place of vim



I hope that this helps,
Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

@yoda, rbatte1, thanks for the replies.
i forgot to add OS information. Servers are AIX and HPUX. i installed vim to one server. i couldnot restore from backup or a version also it is not practical to install vim to all servers. i ll try to find another solution

Thanks

I used to have a shell script for working on source, vis, that wrapped vi and looked for an S directory next to the target file, and files that were writable. If it found these, it checked the file into SCCS in an s.same_name in the S dir before and after editing, if the file was out of sync with the latest in SCCS. This way, I could avoid commenting out everything old into clutter. You need a tool like sccs, and a little scripting. You need code for the first pass, when there is no sccs file, as well as for the times it changes. You can choose to create the S dir as well, for any writable file edited by 'vis'. (Used to be called vim for vi my source, but someone took that!)

I think there are file systems that create version suffixes every time you modify a file. Versioning file system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One system did daily backups and left the old or hard linked current versions in shadow directories under N .snapshotN/ dirs for N days.