UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi Gurus,

I am novice in unix.
I had a requirement where i should get the file when it is loaded in a folder & append time stamp to it & relace that file with timestamp.

i.e., Suppose i have a file in home/input folder as abc.xml

I want to get that file & rename it as abc.xml_11/01/08_12:33:56 & put it in home/input folder.

This script should run continously so that whenever a new file is loaded into the input folder we should rename it with timestamp.

Please provide me any sample script for this requirement

Thanks
san

I'd suggest you not use '/' in the filename as it's the unix character to delimit directories.
A popular timestamp is this:
yyyymmdd.hhmmss
That way round means that it will be sorted by file first, then in date order.

The date command will output the info you want, call it as follows to get the format you specified below:

Code:

date +%d\/%m\/%y_%H\:%M\:%S

To get the format I've suggested:

Code:

date +%Y%m%d.%H%M%S

Hey

Thanks for ur reply
But i required a script how a file will be renamed with timestamp dynamically
The script should run continously & whenever there is a new file in the folder it should rename that file with timestamp(Any format)

Regards,
San

To make something run continuously, use a while loop with a sleep to prevent it using all your cpu:

Code:

while true
do
   <whatever>
   sleep 300 # five minutes
done

To look for new files, I would propose that you specify to the script an expression that will math the new files but not the ones with the timestamp. That way it won't need to keep a running history.
It look like anything ending in '.xml' would do?

If so, the fragment to decide what files need to have a timestamp appended would look like this:

Code:

ls -1 *.xml 2> /dev/null | while read filename
do
  mv $filename ${filename}_${timestamp}
done

put it all together and you have a solution

Thanks for ur reply

But i can't get the point what ur saying.
can u give me a sample script with the example i had said
i dont know the file name which should be append the timestamp
I want to make it as .XML with timestamp
I can't use *.xml because all ends with *.xml


secondly if we use sleep after 5 min i will get files for every one min