UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all,

I am building a shell script. Every morning my shell script will trigger an external system backup script and the backup file (File Name format: "20030929backup.bkp" (i.e)current date + "backup.bkp") will be stored in the backup directory. After successful back, I need to keep only 10 backup files in the backup folder at most. Say on 11th day, day 1 file should be deleted and the 11th day file should be created. What's the best way to do this?

I am using the below command to get the list of backup files from backup directory.
$ find /home/EBI -name "*.bkp" -exec ls {} \;

We need to calculate the calendar days.

I thought of using (-atime +10) but, the thing is this backup script will not run on Sundays. So we miss one day... I guess we may need to count the number of backup files, find the oldest one, delete it and add the current file. What's the simple way to do this?

Thanks.

Try this:

rm `ls -tr *.bkp | head -1`

But, how do I count 10 backup files? and if it exceeds 10 then your command will work to delete the oldest file.

Thanks

I thought that you wanted to delete the oldest file. At this point I don't know what you want. But I'll take a stab at this anyway...

You can count backup files with:
ls *.bkp | wc -l

And this technique will indeed work if you happen to have 10 backup files.

Thanks Perderabo. It worked.

Also, I am trying to send an e-mail notification at the end of this script and I am using

$ /usr/lib/sendmail -v toname@name.com < /home/lognotes.txt

How do I specify the subject field?

Also, Is there a way I can type the message body instead of sending the log file from the command itself. Just simple one line command with "Subject", "To", "message body"

I want to send an e-mail like this:
*******************************************
From: from@name.com
To: toname@name.com
Subject: Notification
Message Body: Backup Success
*******************************************

Please help,

Thanks,
-Jai

You need to use a user agent rather than calling sendmail directly. Or you need to make your script smart enough to actually be a user agent.

You may have user agents named things like elm or mailx. I would use mailx and then the subject is specified with -s.