Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have a problem.

I have some text files in a folder. The names can be like:

emp_20080307053015.dat
emp_20080306053015.dat
emp_20080305053015.dat
emp_20080304053015.dat

The date format appended is like yyyymmdd and timestamp.

What i need is i have to copy the latest file every day i.e. which has the latestdate appended to the file name to a different folder.


Can any one tell a shell script for this?


Thanks in advance....

If that folder only contains those files then you can simply use,

cp `ls -lrt|tail -1|awk '{print $9}'` <absolute path name of the folder>

It has limitations, but has got simplicity.

No this folder contains other files apart from these files also.
Can you please send me the script for this.

thanks.

Code:

today=" $(date '+%b %d') 
for file in $dir
do
if [[ ! -r $file || $(ls -ltr $file 2>/dev/null) = *$today* ]]; then
echo "File is today's file leave it"
else
echo "process something else"
fi
done

Thanks

the follwoing would work fine then,

cp `ls -lrt emp_*.dat|tail -1|awk '{print $9}'` <absolute path name of the folder>

cp `ls emp_*.dat | sort | tail -1` newfile

Thanks
Penchal

I tried using the cmd but it throws me the following error

ksh: awk{print $9}: not found
Usage: cp [-f|-i] [-p] [-S] [-e warn|force|ignore] source_file target_file
cp [-f|-i] [-p] [-S] [-e warn|force|ignore] source_file ... target_directory
cp [-f|-i] [-p] [-S] -R|-r [-e warn|force|ignore] source_directory ... target_directory

Thanks