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I've created a Cron task at my webhost to daily backup my database and I would like it to append the current date to the filename.
My Cron job looks like this
mysqldump -u username -pPassword db_name > www/db_backup/db_backup+date%d%m%y.sql But the file I get is this: db_backup+date no file extension or date.
I've also tried this command
mysqldump -u username -pPassword db_name > www/db_backup/db_backup_'date +%d%m%y'.sql but that doesn't even give an file output.
What is the right syntax for getting the date appended to my file??
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It is a wildcard for every part of the cron schedule expression. So * * * * * means every minute of every hour of every day of every month and every day of the week .
You should use double quotes and need to evaluate date +"%F" using command substitution. Double quote helps you create a single file where some options of date command would include a space. For example, touch test_$(date) will create multiple files, where as touch "test_$(date)" won't.
/dev/null is a special filesystem object that discards everything written into it. Redirecting a stream into it means hiding your program's output. The 2>&1 part means "redirect the error stream into the output stream", so when you redirect the output stream, error stream gets redirected as well.
1 Answer. Show activity on this post. You should try using $HOME rather than ~ as tilde expansion is not reliable in a cron job.
* * * * * echo "hello" > /tmp/helloFile_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M\%S).txt You just need to escape the percent signs.
Other date formats: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-formatting-dates-for-display/
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