Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi I got this to work with tar -cvf `date %m%d%y`
I basically took out the variable assignment.
However it is a hidden file. I need to do an ls -f to see it. Any idea how to fix this?

Thanks,

Phil

that's weird.

the backtick is nothing more than the output from the commands executed in between them.

when i run:

today=`date +%m%d%y`
echo $today

i get '021306'.

that being the case... i changed it and did...

today="`date +%m%d%y`.tar"
tar -cvf $today ./ # tarring just the current dir tree to see if it works

...and everything worked fine... and tarred the files/dirs into 021306.tar

i don't know what kind of system you're using, but i've tried this on windows (Cygwin bash), Linux (Red Hat bash), and AIX (ksh) and got the same results.

don't know why it would be a hidden file. sorry... i wish i had more insight.

Hey Thanks Gents,
I was putting a space after the = in my variable definition. It works fine with out the space. I am use to using a debugger of some sort.

Thanks, again

Phil

ah yes, the infamous "space" char. i've accidentally done that MANY time. yes, a debugger would be nice, wouldn't it? you can, however, look into the "-x" flag with ksh which will pretty much show you all your vars, etc. as your script steps through each line.

The first line is the same as just
date +%m%d%y
and it produced the display that looked correct. Prepending "TODAY= " is legal to most commands and it temporarily set TODAY equal to nothing during the execution of the date command. This was a no-op since the date command does not use the value of TODAY. When we get the second line, we echo the current value of TODAY which apparently was nothing perhaps because the variable was otherwise unset. The OP saw the output from the first command and mistook is for the output from the second command. For debugging use statements like:
echo TODAY = $TODAY
to avoid this and other problems.