need help with naming files in cron

I am a complete novice in Linux, so this might be a really stupid question...

I have a cron job which creates hourly backups of the database:

mysqldump database_name | gzip > /var/www/backup/data.dump.gz

What I would like to do, is to name the resulting files using timestamp, or some other naming convention, to keep backups unique. In other words, how can I use a variable for the filename in this situation?

Thanks for your help.
Kirill

Just add a date like so:

BTW, why are you not using full path for mysqldump?

Thanks for your reply. However, your suggestion does not work. It gives me an error "too many non-option arguments." Do you know what I am doing wrong?

Thanks for your help.
Kirill

Show us your revision of that line. Note, you need to quote your path.

And a clarification- those are backticks, not single quotes. Backticks are on the same key as the ~

Here is the complete line from the file:

mysqldump database_name | gzip > /var/www/backup/`date +'%B-%d-%Y'`-data.dump.gz

If I put quotes around the path, it stops executing date command. I know I am probably missing something very simple.

Can you guys help, please?

Kirill

here's what I have - very similar to freebsd's suggestion:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump --add-drop-table --add-locks msgboard > /webhome/sql/msgboard`date +%y%m%d`.sql

I figured it out.

Thanks for the help, though!

cant you just use the \ for spaces and get rid of the quotes altogether?