Displaying Date/Time Formats

I am having trouble figuring out how the time in a date/time stamp can be created in this format: 20060320_143635323.xml

How can I generate the time in this format ( other than, H%M%S%...) ?

Thanks in advance.

crode02

Welcome to Dev Shed. Please visit the Rules/Guidelines forum and find and read a thread entitled, "How to post a question." There's not enough information for us (me anyway) to help you.

I would sggest a peek at the man pages for the date command - you would be looking at something like `date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S` - not sure off the top of my head about time less than seconds - but they may be available. The backticks (The ``) charaters mean, in efefct, execute in place and substitute with the output of the command, thus if you were to to something like:

my_command > `date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.xml

Any output (from stdout) would be sent to a file named with the date/time of when the command was issued, with .xml added on to the end.

If you will need to refer to this file later - you MAY have issues - like, just what was the date/time when that command ran ...? In cases like that chuck the date into a variable and use that instead ...

File_date=`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`

my_command > ${File_date}.xml

.
.
.
.
Then, much later, you can refer to the file again with ease, as the date/time is stored in the variable, maybe to check if a particular entry was made (this is just an example!):

grep "entry=$SEARCH" ${File_dat}.xml

use POSIX qw(strftime);
my $adate = strftime("%y%m%d", localtime(time));
$adate = conc($adate, "_143635323.xml")

print $adate

#20060320_143635323.xml