Hello, I am currently running a shell script on crontab that uses mysqldump to backup my db on a daily basis then FTPs the file to another server. I have the script working fine but I would like to keep a "history" of the db by attaching the systems current date to the filename (EX sqlbackup_04282004.tar.gz sqlbackup_04292004 etc...) Heres what I have working so far: #! /bin/bash /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump --opt -u username -pPASSWORD dbname > /home/dir1/dir2/dir3/backup.sql cd /home/dir1/dir2/dir3 tar -czvf sqlbackup.tar.gz /home/dir1/dir2/dir3/backup.sql lftp <<EOF open ftpserver user username password pwd ls put sqlbackup.tar.gz bye EOF

Use "sqlbackup_`date +%m%d%Y`.tar.gz" for the filename. Note that those are backticks, not apostrophes. Read the man page for date if you want a different format.