Add modification time to the filename

Question

I need to add the creation date of the file with the file name. Eg if a creation date of the file Test is 22 Mar 2017, then I need to change it as test_rbc_22032017. I am able to perform for a single file but not sure how to create a script to change the name for n number of files in a given directory. I tried the below but no luck

for f in /path ; do mv -n ""$f"_RBS_(date -r "$f" +"%Y%M%D")"; done

but no luck. please suggest a solution

Answer 1

First thing is that the mv command takes a source and destination, you are only providing one.

Next thing is the date format, according to your information you want %Y for the year, %m for the month and %d for the day, see man date for an explanation of the differences between the sequences.

Third point is that you only provide the path (for f in /path) instead of referring to files (for f in /path/*). So a working example will be:

for f in /path/*; do mv -n "$f" "${f}_$(date -r "$f" +'%Y%m%d')"; done

Answer 2

Your command has a few problems:

for f in /path ; do mv -n ""$f"_RBS_(date -r "$f" +"%Y%M%D")"; done

• for f in /path will only go once around the loop (with f = /path). You probably want for f in /path/* to consider every file in the /path/ directory (if you want to consider files in subdirectories, that's a whole nother question).

• mv needs two arguments. The source is obviously "$f". The destination needs to be the transformed name.

• You missed the $ in the $(...) command substitution.

• The format string for date doesn't match your description (and you probably want month and day rather than minute and short-date)

• You're using date of modification, not creation date (which isn't kept, on most filesystem types). I'll leave this as-is.

• Your description implies that you want the filename to be in lower case.

With the above corrected (apart from the choice of which date to use), we end up with

for f in /path/* ; do mv -n "$f" "${f,,}_rbc_$(date -r "$f" +'%d%m%Y')"; done

Another thing to consider is that if you're doing this more than once in the same place, you might want to move the files to a different directory or test to see if they already have a plausible suffix (either remove it before adding the new one, or just leave such files untouched).

Answer 3

try this kind operation, and adapt it to your situation: now=$(date +"%m_%d_%Y") file="/nas/backup_$now.sql"

so should work: for f in /path ; do mv -n "$f" "${f}_RBS_$(date +"%m_%d_%Y")"; done

Answer 4

This is the best way to do it.

Here is the script to add the creation date of the file for n number of files in given directory.

#!/bin/bash

path="/home/modassir/data/"
listoffiles=$(ls -1 /home/modassir/data)


for f in $listoffiles; do
   file=$(date -r $path$f +'%d%m%Y-%H:%M:%S')
   mv $path''$f'' $path''$f''_rbc_''$file''
done;

/home/modassir/data is the directory name