Question

How can I set the crontab to create, say for example, text files with dynamic file names? What I mean is, for instance, I will set the crontab that a text file will be created every minute in a directory. Then the filename that will be assigned to a text file will be depending on what time of the day it is.

Illustration:

0001.txt
0002.txt
0003.txt
0004.txt
…

and so on and so forth.

(Though the example above does not show text file names of the time of the day, you will get the point)

Answer 1

The date command can be used to get the current date and time in the format you want for the files.

filename="`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M.txt`"
echo "File created" > filename

Will, right now for me, create a file named “2011-11-12_0905.txt”.