how to create a file named $date?(bash experts)

[stillman]

i have a lot of log files that can not be gripped by metalog, like named-logfiles and asterisk-logs. now i'd like to add a cronjob to gzip these files(also config-files would be nice) and name the file by the date the archive has been created, additionally adding directories for every month and move those archives in the monthly dirs. though i'm not very keen on bash yet so i can't figure out how to create a file named with the date(i had several attempts though)... anyone here having mercy and tell me how i could "touch ${date}"?

[tomvollerthun]

I make it like this:

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date=`date +%d%m%g`
touch $date

That presumes that you have the date-command which belongs to coreutils, but I think most boxes will have it.

If you don't like the day-month-year format, see man date ;)

cu, tom

[Earthwings]

As a sidenote, isn't that what logrotate is for?

[i92guboj]

The easiest is to use the output of the date command as the input for touch (or whatever other program).

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$ touch `date`

No that the little things are not single quotations ( ' ) but reverse accents (`). Bash expands the contents of anything inside this accents to the output wich results of the running of that contents, in this case, the command "date".

Another very tipical example is the use of this thing to locate the current running kernel modules directory:

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cd /lib/modules/`uname -r`

[stillman]

thx guys!

@Earthwings:yes, but can you advice logrotate to gzip the files as well? and i want to make backups of my configs as well...

[Earthwings]

You can activate compression in /etc/logrotate.conf. logrotate is not a backup tool for config files, that's right.