UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I need to be able to concatenate all the files in a directory into a new filename and a different directory. I want to append the date in YYYYMMDD format to the new filename (ie, newfilename_20090207). The original files will have different filenames so I will need to be able to loop thru each file and concatename to newfilename_20090207.

After I successfully create this newfilename_20090207, I need to delete the original files. After I delete all the original files, the directory should not contain any files so it is ready to receive a new set of files the next day.

Does anyone have any code that does something similar to what I need to do so I have a starting point to write this code. I especially need help to loop thru all the files that might exist in the directory. The number of files can vary from day to day.

Thanks.
Ryan

Do the files need to be processed in any particular order? Will they ever be a very large numbeR? This can do it alphabetically, if the files don't have spaces in their names and don't number in the hundreds:

Code:

FILES=( dir/* )
cat ${FILES[*]} > newfilename_$(date +%Y%m%d) && rm ${FILES[*]}