First of all want to apologize for such a simple question. Very "new" to UNIX and have just taken a small intro class.
I need to pull back YYYYMMDD and store it in a field to be used later. I figured out date "+%Y%m%d" returns the date in that format, just not sure how to store it.
I am going to be emailing a file that is called for example report20090303.txt.
touch report`date "+%Y%m%d"`.txt
touch `date 'report+%Y%m%d'`.txt
Don't really understand what the "touch" does. I thought this would work, but it isn't...
Store the Date as follows:
DATE=$(date +%Y%m%d)
Then email it like this...
cat '${report_file}$DATE.txt' >> mailfile
echo "
--^A^A^A^A^A--" >> mailfile
sendmail ${recip_adr} < mailfile
I am getting the following error though:
Cannot open ${report_file}$DATE.txt. Why is it not resolving the symbolics?
the touch command create an empty file.
try it like that:
DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
Then email it like this...
cat ${report_file}${DATE}.txt >> mailfile
echo "
--^A^A^A^A^A--" >> mailfile
sendmail ${recip_adr} < mailfile
Thanks, I am getting closer...
now it is putting 'date \+%Y%m%d' in \{DATE\}, not the value 20090303.Make sure you have a backtick (`) not a single quote ('). Its doesnt have the same effect.
You should have that :
DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
and not :
DATE='date +%Y%m%d'
Wow, this is picky! 
That worked, thanks for your help!