Bash date problem

Question

I'm running this bash script to make a backup of the database, but I'm always getting an error on the date and tar command.

#!/bin/bash
backup_filename=/var/www/vhosts/foo.com/private/backup_foo_db.sql
filename="db_daily_"`date +%Y%m%d`".tar.gz"
compressed_filename=/var/www/vhosts/foo.com/private/backup_foo_db_$filename.tar.gz
mysqldump --add-drop-table -h localhost -ufoo -pbar foobar > $backup_filename
tar cvfz $compressed_filename $backup_filename
rm $backup_filename

./mysqlbackup.sh: line 3: date: command not found

Could this be a permission problem? I'm not running that file as root.

Answer 1

Are you running this as a cron job or something similar? If so, the problem is likely that it's running with a different PATH than normal, and it doesn't include the directories that date and tar are in. There are two easy ways to fix this: either use full paths for the commands (e.g. /usr/bin/date, as @glenn jackman suggested) or explicitly set PATH at the top of the script (e.g. PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin or something similar).

BTW, you're also going to wind up with a weird backup filename. First, you set filename to something like "db_daily_20110926.tar.gz", then set compressed_filename to something like "/var/www/vhosts/foo.com/private/backup_foo_db_db_daily_20110926.tar.gz.tar.gz". This is probably not what you intended.

Answer 2

Simplify and split this line into multiple lines, from:

filename="db_daily_"`date +%Y%m%d`".tar.gz"

So it becomes something like this:

myDate=`date +"%Y%m%d"`
filename="db_daily_"$myDate".tar.gz"