Linux Shell script to copy files from one location to another location

I have a folder in my server which contains some files. These are automated that means everyday we get new files automatically which will overwrite the old ones. So want to take a back up for this data. How can i copy all these files in to a another folder by renaming the files with current date while copying.

ex : i have a folder named folder1 which contains 4 files. path for this folder is home/install/project1/folder1

aaa.dat
bbb.dat
ccc.dat
ddd.dat

now i want to copy all these four files in to a different folder named folder2. path for this folder is home/install/project1/folder2. while copying these files i want to rename each file and add the current date to the file. so my file names in folder2 should be..

aaa091012.dat
bbb091012.dat
ccc091012.dat
ddd091012.dat

I want to write a Linux shell script for this. Please give me some idea or some sample scripts related to this.

3 Answers

srcdir="home/install/project1/folder1"
dstdir="home/install/project1/folder2"
d=$(date +%m%d%y)
for srcfile in ${srcdir}/*
do dstfile=$(basename $srcfile) dstfile=${dstfile/\./${d}\.} cp $srcfile $dstdir/$dstfile
done

You can do it in 2 steps, first cp:

cp -rp source/ target/

Then use rename. But you should use Ubuntu flavor of it, which is actually Perl script. For Redhat, you might be able to install or download it from . Unfortunately, native Redhat/Fedora rename does not support Perl regular expressions and will not work for this.

At any rate, use Perl-ish rename like this:

cd target
rename 's/\.dat$/ *

You can even use it recursively by combining it with find and xargs, something like:

find | xargs rename 's/\.dat$/

this worked for me:

 cd home/install/project1/folder1 for f in *.dat do cp -v $f /home/install/project1/folder2/${f%.dat}$(date +%m%d%y).dat done