Question

I’m trying to write a bash script to create/check for the existence of a file based on the date. Basically I want to have a direcotry of todo_lists inside of which are files with todays todo list. So every time I open the terminal (mac os 10.6.8) it would check to see if 6-29-11.txt or whatever based on

date "+%m%d%Y"

if it exists just less the contents of it and if it doesn’t create one.

so I was wondering how to use that date formatted string as a file name and how to check string variables i.e.

[ -e date_string.txt ] && ...

How would I accomplish these things, I’m pretty new to bash

Answer 1

Try this:

DATE=`date "+%m%d%Y"`
if [ -f "todo_lists/$DATE.txt" ]; then
  do stuff
fi

The backticks (`) means, run this command and return the output as a string