Question

I’m new to command line on my ubuntu s3 micro instance and I need a cron job that grabs an image every minute and renames it to datestamp.jpg in a folder… example:

get this url: http://www.webcam1.com/live.jpg
rename to year_month_day_hour_min_second.jpg
save to cams/webcam1/

Thanks for your suggestions!

Answer 1

You can do this in one command:

wget "http://www.webcam1.com/live.jpg" -O `date +"%Y_%m_%d_%H_%M_%S.jpg"`

If you are doing this from a bash script:

#!/bin/bash
dir="/cams/webcam1/"
now=`date +"%Y_%m_%d_%H_%M_%S.jpg"`
wget "http://www.webcam1.com/live.jpg" -O "$dir$now"

Save that bash script somewhere, and make sure to make it executable: chmod +x /path/to/my/script.sh

And then add this line to your crontab (crontab -e):

* * * * * /path/to/my/script.sh

And that should do it 🙂