Question

I’m trying to add a datestamp to my output files using perl. What I’m getting is a strange ‘?’ appended to the time stamp for a logfile.

Output file: abcdump-20110120?.log

And the other strange behavior is that my code won’t name my output file with a .csv extension where I am using my $dt (date) variable $node-$tblist.$dt.csv

Output file: foo-p000.20110120

But, If I remove $dt from the naming convention $node-$tblist.csv

it will work: foo-p000.csv

It must be how I am trying to create my datestamp.

Code:

    my $dt =  `date '+%Y%m%d'`;
    open (LOG, "> abcdump-$dt.log") || die "cannot append";
    foreach my $tblist (@tblist)
    {
       chomp $tblist;   
       my $crfile = qq{mysql -u test -pf00 --database $dbsrc -h $node -ss -e "SELECT 'a','b','c' UNION SELECT 1,2,3 FROM $tblist"| tr "\t" ",">$node-$tblist.$dt.csv};
       system($crfile); 
       print LOG "Executed on $dt => $crfile\n";
    };
    close(LOG);

Answer 1

Ignoring the other issues in your code, I suspect it’s a newline as part of the date output.

chomp $dt;

should take care of both of the problems you describe.

You may also wish to consider using Perl’s localtime or gmtime instead.