UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

HIya,

Having a dumb day whilst writing an archive process in Shell want to extract from the filename the date and archive into tar files based on this, I don't want to use mtime as it may not be the actual file date.

The files are

-rw-rw---- 1 user admin 100 Aug 29 11:10 Jav_Transmission_20080826.dat
-rw-rw---- 1 user admin 100 Aug 29 11:10 Jav_Transmission_20080827.dat
-rw-rw---- 1 user admin 100 Aug 29 11:11 Jav_Transmission_20080828.dat
-rw-rw---- 1 user admin 100 Aug 29 11:11 Jav_Transmission_20080829.dat

so for each of the days in the below dir I want to find a way to sort of

for dates in `ls -l |extract distinct file date in thias directory`

tar -cvf ${dates}.tar *${dates}*.dat
mv ${dates}.tar /arc

done

So of thing, any help gratefully received.

Lets start by the dates:
Hint:
ls -ltr|awk '{print $6,$7}' |uniq

In the couple of hours between submitting question for moderation and posting I have written the following

Code:

#Get list of unique dates for which we have files for
for dates in `ls *0* |grep -v $TODAY|grep -v $TODAYmin1|grep -v $TODAYmin2|grep -v $TODAYmin3| cat | tr "_" " " | awk '{print substr($3,1,8)}' | sort -u`
do
#Tar into daily archives
tar -cvf ${dates}.tar *${dates}*.dat
#Compress it
gzip ${dates}.tar

#Check the arc directory exists or make it
if [ -d $ARC_DIR ]
then
echo "This dirname [$ARC_DIR] exists"
else
echo "[$ARC_DIR] does not exist creating"
mkdir arc
fi 

#Move it into Arc directory
mv ${dates}.tar.gz arc/
#exit inner loop
done

#Now we must delete files outside of the retention period $3
#find arc/*.gz -mtime +{$RETENTION_PERIOD} -exec rm {} \;
find arc/*.gz -mtime +{$DAILY_RETENTION_PERIOD} -exec ls -rtl {} \;

cd ${BASE_DIR}
#loop

#exit outer loop
done

Which works fine, but thank you anyways.