Question

I have a watchdog implemented in bash that is restarting a service on certain conditions and it does move the old logs to an old directory.

The problem is that I do want to move the logs to old_1, old_2, … if previous one exists.

How can I implement this in bash?

Answer 1

You can search for the first non-existing log like this:

#!/bin/bash
num=1
while [[ -f log_$num ]] ; do
    let num++
done
echo Fresh new: log_$num