使用 crontab 重命名和移动文件

Question

I want to make a backup of my history.txt file, where I store some information of my system. I would like to do this using the crontab and this is what I have now in my crontab:

0 * * * * cp -a history.txt "history-$(date + "%Y%m%d-%h%m%s")" ; mv "history-$(date + "%Y%m%d-%h%m%s")" l-systems

Like you can see i want to preform the backup every hour and I want to give the file a name with the date. First I make a cp of the file and rename it. After that I try to move the new file in a directory called l-systems. This doesn't work right now, can someone help?

Answer 1

I would advise you to make a backup shell script like so:

#!/bin/sh

DATE=$(date + "%Y%m%d-%h%m%s")
cp -a history.txt "history-$DATE"
mv "history-$DATE" l-systems

The call this script from crontab. Since we use the same variable twice it will always be the same for both commands regardless of how long each takes