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Is there any possibility to pass current date/time to command in my cron job? E.g. I want to make sql dump every night and name the dump file like 'dump-yyyy-mm-dd.sql'.

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

That would be something along the lines of:

mysqldump database > database-$(date +%F).sql

The $() will embed the output of date +%F, which is YYYY-MM-DD into the command line.

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Thank you. Ideal solution – user874560 Aug 2 '11 at 12:19
You should be careful to escape %s with backslashes in your format string if you're using a POSIX compliant cron, otherwise everything after the first % will be treated as standard input for the command. Check man 5 crontab for details on this surprising yet fun feature. – mark Aug 2 '11 at 12:27
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up vote 6 down vote

Sgaduuw's answer does work (and I've upvoted it), but I usually encourage people to write scripts and call those from cron, rather than try and do too much in the cron command directly. Firstly, it allows to you easily test / enhance your script without having to mess with cron configuration, and secondly it allows you to be in better control of the environment in which your commands execute.

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