Shell Programming and Scripting

hi can any one pls tell me how to copy a file from a remote host to the same remote host with a timestamp, i need to use only scp.
thnks

In scp syntax there isn't such option for time stamp, i mean, you cannot do "scp root@host:/file root@host:/new-path-to-file`date`" or something like that. Why not just login, rename the file and copy localy ? Maybe lack of shell ?

hi this scp is a part of my main script, what it must do is to make a back up of the old file on the destination server with the timestamp,and then copy the new files frm the source server to the destination server.

thnks for the reply

Locally you can generally do :

Code:

cp file-name new-file-name."`date`"

, but via scp you can't add timestamps in this manner, I just tried it on local machine, but it doesn't accept such kind of input.

It looks like scp allows for variables, maybe you could set date as a variable?

$ /usr/bin/scp sourceID@sourceBOX:/home/sourceID/.forward /home/targetID/.forward-$TEST

.forward 100% 305 0.3KB/s 00:00

$ ls -la
total 64
drwx------ 4 targetID targetID 4096 Aug 8 12:01 .
drwxr-xr-x 37 root root 4096 Aug 3 13:57 ..
-rw------- 1 targetID targetID 816 Aug 8 11:45 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 targetID targetID 24 Aug 1 11:37 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r-- 1 targetID targetID 176 Aug 1 11:37 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 targetID targetID 124 Aug 1 11:37 .bashrc
drwxrwxr-x 2 targetID targetID 4096 Aug 8 11:45 Crontab
-rw-r--r-- 1 targetID targetID 305 Aug 8 11:45 .forward
-rw-r--r-- 1 targetID targetID 305 Aug 8 12:01 .forward-test