On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 03:56:30PM -0700, jenea wrote: > This is my script: > ================================================================= > #!/bin/bash > today_day=$(echo `date +"'%e %b %Y'"`) >
echo `...` is usually redundant. In this case, it definitely is. You only need: today_day=$(date "+%e %b %Y") You don't need (or want!) those literal single quotes in the data either. > echo $today_day > > tar -cvz --newer $today_day -f /mnt/usb_backup/backup/diff/backupFull_`date > +%Y%m%d`.tgz /mnt/mirror80gb/Shared_Folder/ Missing quotes. Your today_day variable contains data with spaces, so if you want it to be passed as a single argument to tar, you must quote it. tar -cvz --newer "$today_day" -f ... > + tar -cvz --newer ''\''25' Mar '2009'\''' -f > /mnt/usb_backup/backup/diff/backupFull_20090325.tgz > /mnt/mirror80gb/Shared_Folder/ > tar: Failed to open '/dev/sa0': Operation not supported > filer:/mnt/usb_backup/backup/test# Here you see where it fails because of your two problems: extra single quotes in the data, and failure to quote the parameter expansion in order to treat it as a single word. The -f option appears (from tar's point of view) after the "Mar" and "2009'" arguments, which tar assumes are files/directories, so tar stopped processing arguments at that point. Therefore it didn't see "-f foo.tgz" as an output file, and therefore it used /dev/sa0 as its output file (which I presume is your OS's default). today_day=$(date "+%e %b %Y") tar -cvz --newer "$today_day" -f ... That should fix it.
