Creating a file name as a timestamp in a batch job

Question

We have a batch job that runs every day and copies a file to a pickup folder. I want to also take a copy of that file and drop it into an archive folder with the filename

 yyyy-MM-dd.log 

What's the easiest way to do this in a Windows batch job?

I'm basically looking for an equivalent of this Unix command:

cp source.log `date +%F`.log 

Answer 1

CP source.log %DATE:~-4%-%DATE:~4,2%-%DATE:~7,2%.log 

But it's locale dependent. I'm not sure if %DATE% is localized, or depends on the format specified for the short date in Windows.

Here is a locale-independent way to extract the current date from this answer, but it depends on WMIC and FOR /F:

FOR /F %%A IN ('WMIC OS GET LocalDateTime ^| FINDSTR \.') DO @SET B=%%A CP source.log %B:~0,4%-%B:~4,2%-%B:~6,2%.log 

Answer 2

This worked for me and was a filename-safe solution (though it generates a MM-dd-YYYY format):

C:\ set SAVESTAMP=%DATE:/=-%@%TIME::=-% C:\ set SAVESTAMP=%SAVESTAMP: =% C:\ set SAVESTAMP=%SAVESTAMP:,=.%.jpg C:\ echo %SAVESTAMP% [email protected] 

The first command takes a DATE and replaces / with -, takes the TIME and replaces : with -, and combines them into DATE@TIME format. The second set statement removes any spaces, and the third set replaces , with . and appends the .jpg extension.

The above code is used in a little script that pulls images from a security IP Camera for further processing:

:while set SAVESTAMP=%DATE:/=-%@%TIME::=-% set SAVESTAMP=%SAVESTAMP: =% set SAVESTAMP=%SAVESTAMP:,=.%.jpg wget-1.10.2.exe --tries=0 -O %SAVESTAMP% http://admin:<password>@<ip address>:<port>/snapshot.cgi timeout 1 GOTO while