what is wrong with this tar command?

[Ant2ne]

sudo tar --create --file=docs.$(date).tar ~/docs/*.*

I want the tar file to have the creation date in the name regardless of what date the file was made.

[jankushka]

Re: what is wrong with this tar command?

not sure what you mean.
not sure why you use "sudo" either.

see if this is what you're looking for:

tar --create --file=docs.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`.tar ~/docs/*.*

"old" syntax (just out of curiosity) would be something like:

tar cvf docs.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`.tar ~/docs/*.*

hth

[Ant2ne]

Re: what is wrong with this tar command?

not sure what you mean.
not sure why you use "sudo" either.

see if this is what you're looking for:

tar --create --file=docs.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`.tar ~/docs/*.*

That code was exactly what I was looking for (without the H M or S. BTW I used sudo because I was getting permissions errors. I was using it from across volumes/computers. Thanks! 8)

[Ant2ne]

Re: what is wrong with this tar command?

tar --create --file=docs.`date +%Y%m%d`.tar ~/docs/*.*

New problem
How do I tar recursively (ie. all files and folders and sub folders) in the above mentioned directory.

rm -R /docs

would recursively remove files and folders in a given directory.

[Snowhog]

Re: what is wrong with this tar command?

--recursion
recurse into directories (the default)

[Ant2ne]

Re: what is wrong with this tar command?

Ahh yes, it is default. But I was putting the "/*.*" which changed the default and specified only files that met that specification. *.* is a nasty DOS habit.

[Snowhog]

Re: what is wrong with this tar command?

Yup. Old habits die hard.

From the Description of the TAR man page:

The final arguments to tar are the names of the files or direc‐
tories which should be archived. The use of a directory name always
implies that the subdirectories below should be included in the
archive.

[DMurray]

Re: what is wrong with this tar command?

There is no "date" environment variable unless you set it. The `date` command showed above solves at least part of the problem.