Creating a file name as a timestamp in a batch job
We have a batch job that runs every day and copies a file to a pickup folder. I want to also take a copy of that file and drop it into an archive folder with the filename
yyyy-MM-dd.log
What's the easiest way to do this in a Windows batch job?
I'm basically looking for an equivalent of this Unix command:
cp source.log `date +%F`.log
CP source.log %DATE:~-4%-%DATE:~4,2%-%DATE:~7,2%.log
But it's locale dependent. I'm not sure if %DATE%
is localized, or depends on the format specified for the short date in Windows.
Here is a locale-independent way to extract the current date from this answer, but it depends on WMIC
and FOR /F
:
FOR /F %%A IN ('WMIC OS GET LocalDateTime ^| FINDSTR \.') DO @SET B=%%A
CP source.log %B:~0,4%-%B:~4,2%-%B:~6,2%.log
This worked for me and was a filename-safe solution (though it generates a MM-dd-YYYY format):
C:\ set SAVESTAMP=%DATE:/=-%@%TIME::=-%
C:\ set SAVESTAMP=%SAVESTAMP: =%
C:\ set SAVESTAMP=%SAVESTAMP:,=.%.jpg
C:\ echo %SAVESTAMP%
[email protected]
The first command takes a DATE and replaces /
with -
, takes the TIME and replaces :
with -
, and combines them into DATE@TIME format. The second set
statement removes any spaces, and the third set
replaces ,
with .
and appends the .jpg
extension.
The above code is used in a little script that pulls images from a security IP Camera for further processing:
:while
set SAVESTAMP=%DATE:/=-%@%TIME::=-%
set SAVESTAMP=%SAVESTAMP: =%
set SAVESTAMP=%SAVESTAMP:,=.%.jpg
wget-1.10.2.exe --tries=0 -O %SAVESTAMP% http://admin:<password>@<ip address>:<port>/snapshot.cgi
timeout 1
GOTO while