directory with automatic time in it in unix shell

Question

I want to create script where newly generated directory automatically have the current time as part of name.

syntax

mkdir mydir[min-hour-day-month-year]

thus the recent directory will be named as

mydir101718052012

directory created after one hour

mydir111718052012

and so on.

Sorry for simple question, I am new to unix and I using bash

Edits: Why is not following correct ? How can I do it ?

newdir = mydir$( date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S)
cp new.txt newdir/new1.txt

Answer 1

If your implementation of date supports these options you can simply do:

mkdir mydir$( date +%M%H%d%m%Y )

Note that this does not insert hyphens in the name as per your sample output. To get the hyphens as in your initial description:

mkdir mydir$( date +%M-%H-%d-%m-%Y )

Answer 2

I have the following functions set up in my bash startup scripts:

# Date Time Stamp
dts() { date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S; }

# Date mkdir
dmkdir() { mkdir $(dts); }

I use them chiefly on the command line, if you want to run them inside a script, you'll have to either source the startup script or define the shell functions within the script. If you wanted to prepend a name (e.g. mydir), you could easily give it an argument like this:

# Date mkdir
dmkdir() { mkdir "$@$(dts)"; }

This would be called like this:

$ dmkdir mydir
$ ls -d mydir*
mydir2012-05-18-11-38-40

This does mean that if your argument list contains spaces, they will show up in the directory name, which might or might not be a good thing.

You can assign a shell variable inside the shell function, this can be accessed outside the function:

dmkdir() { newdir="$@$(dts)"; mkdir $newdir; }

Used like this:

$ dmkdir mydir
$ cd $newdir
$ pwd
/tmp/mydir2012-05-18-12-54-32

This is very handy, but there are a couple of things that you have to be careful of: 1) you're polluting your namespace -- you may overwrite a shell variable called $newdir created by a different process 2) It's very easy to forget which variable dmkdir is going to write to, especially if you have a lot of shell functions writing out variables. A good naming convention will help a lot with both issues.

Another option is to have the shell function echo the directory name:

dmkdir() { local newdir="$@$(dts)"; mkdir $newdir && echo $newdir; }

This can be called as follows:

newdir="$(dmkdir mydir)"

local means that $newdir isn't available outside of dmkdir, which is a Good Thing(TM).

The use of && means that you only echo the name of the directory if the directory creation is successful.

The $() syntax allows you to load anything echoed to STDOUT to be loaded into a variable, and the single quotes ensure that if there are any spaces in the directory name, it still gets loaded into a single variable.

This gets around the namespace pollution problems inherent in the previous solution.