date stamping files in dos batch jobs

TinCool

Hey guys,

I've written a little batch job to give me a directory listing and piped out the results to a file, say results.txt for arguments sake. This runs each day. What would be great would be to date stamp the files and then archive them off to another directory so I'd have for today 27122001results.txt

I've messed about with the type command, piping etc etc but I cant find an easy why to do it using solely dos commands.

Does anyone have any suggestions or have done something similar themselves.

Cheers,
Tin

Hobbes

touch.exe ?

not sure why you would want to change the date though? If the file was altered wouldn't the archive bit be set?

dragonkin

Thanks Hobbes gave me a good excuse to start coding!
Whipped together this little proggie for you hopefully it will do what you want.
"timestamp" (with no arguments) returns 31122001.. not much use I know.

"timestamp filename" renames filename to 31122001filename (or whatever)

Hopefully that is of some use to you email me with problems

DK

dragonkin

I don't know why but the attachment didn't work the last time..
It's my first time trying an attachment so maybe I'm just not seeing it ??

www.esatclear.ie/~thelair/timestamp.zip (if all else fails)

TinCool

Thanks dragonkin. I actually found a similar exe called now.exe which does exactly the same thing as yours. Thanks for your efforts though, how did you code that btw ?

dragonkin

Ohh just a bit of simple C/C++
using the time.h header file

Only about 20 lines of code in all


DK

Hobbes

I misread what he wanted. I could probably do it in one line, two tops. Do I win a prize?

W2K command allows you create a date variable.

I think it's something like $~d1 or something like that (not confirmed!). I'd need to read the help screen again.

so it would be something like.

ren %1 %~d1%1

If your using NT you could use the output from the DATE command via another batch file and use the SET command to pull out the bits you want to create the date from.

eg.

ENTER.TXT
put in one blank line (press enter once)


A.BAT
DATE < ENTER.TXT | find "Current" > TEMP.BAT
call TEMP


CURRENT.BAT

set CDATE=%5


So when you run A.BAT it will write the following line to temp.bat

Current date is Sat 05/01/2002

Then when you run temp.bat it will run CURRENT.BAT and supply those variables.

In NT the SET command has a substring option. I can't remember it offhand, but if you check the help it will explain it so you could change the 05/01/2002 to 20020105 (metric date is best for sorting). After that it's just a case of ren %1 %CDATE%1

Hobbes

Checked into it. This will work in a batch file on W2K (possibly NT as well). You need launch CMD.EXE with /V option though.

:@echo off

set TODAY=%DATE:~10,4%%DATE:~7,2%%DATE:~4,2%

echo @echo off > \temp.bat
for /R . %%x in (*.*) do echo ren %%x %TODAY%%%~nx >> \temp.bat
call \temp.bat
del \temp.bat

You have to pipe the command to ren to a file because if you rename as you go the FOR command gets all confused.