How does one get yesterday's date format in a batch file?
I'd like it to look like so: M_d_yyyy
Note that if there's a single digit day and month, I'd like it to be single digits.
Example: 8_5_2013 is August 5th, 2013.
I looked around for a few days but couldn't find a solution.. any lead is much appreciated.
Nothing wrong with free 3rd party executables, but some of us are not allowed to use them on our work machines.
I have written a powerful hybrid JScript/batch utility called getTimestamp.bat that can do nearly any date and time computation on a Windows machine.
There are a great many options for specifying the base date and time, many options for adding positive or negative offsets to the date and time, many options for formatting the result, and an option to capture the result in a variable. Both input and output can be directly expressed as local time, UTC, or any time zone of your choosing. Full documentation is embedded within the script.
The utility is pure script that will run on any modern Windows machine from XP forward - no 3rd party executable required.
Assuming getTimestamp.bat is in your current directory, or better yet, somewhere within your PATH, then the following simple call will define a dt variable containing yesterday's date in M_D_YYYY format:
call getTimestamp -od -1 -f {m}_{d}_{yyyy} -r dt
Note: when I put a date in a file name, I like to use YYYY_MM_DD format because that format will sort chronologically when getting a directory listing.
I think you should get date.exe from UnxUtils.
date.exe --date="1 day ago" "+%-m_%d_%Y"
Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/files/unxutils/current/
Man page: http://www.ss64.com/bash/date.html
#echo off
setlocal
set magic="c:\unx\usr\local\wbin\date.exe" --date="1 day ago" "+%%-m_%%d_%%Y"
for /f %%i in ('%magic%') do set yesterdate=%%i
echo yesterdate = %yesterdate%
If you want to do it with just batch language, you'll end up with nearly 100 lines of incomprehensible batch code. UPDATE: or use dbenham's hybrid batch/JScript solution posted in the answer below, which at least uses sane Windows APIs.
See Also:
How to get current datetime on Windows command line, in a suitable format for using in a filename?
Related
I'm trying to build a batch script that will iterate over a set of folders and give me the most recently modified file (and later check if the date of that file is 180 days old). Right now, what I'm working with is this:
setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion
for /f %%f in ('dir /b /s /od /tw "<some UNC path>\*.*"') do (
REM Make sure the variable is defined the first time we try to compare it
if NOT DEFINED fileDateTime set fileDateTime=%%~tf
if %%~tf LEQ !fileDateTime! (
set fileDateTime=%%~tf
set fileName=%%nxf
set filePath=\\%%~pf
))
This does not work.Specifically, everything except the comparison at the start works. It seems completely arbitrary how the computer parses the LEQ; I can't find a consistent pattern. It definitely isn't comparing two dates with each other.
The variable !fileDateTime! always has the same format as %%~tf, basically by definition. But Batch doesn't know what to do with it, or rather, I'm not sure how to tell Batch what to do with it.
I have tried using ForFile, but the path in question is a network share, so it fails (and for some reason the workaround with Net Use doesn't like to work either.)
Is there an easier way to get the most recent file in a folder and check how old it is?
(Also, the server holding the UNC path is a linux server, so if this is substantially easier in Bash, I could do that too.)
EDIT: if anyone is wondering how I fixed this, my solution was "realize that there's absolutely no reason I should be doing this is batch to begin with, install Python on the server, and script it in that instead." This will now be my go-to solution for batch problems in the future. But thank you all very much for the advice, which definitely would have helped if I didn't change tack.
The date you get is a string, not a date object like you'd get in an object-oriented language.
And the LEQ operator can only compare integers, not arbitrary strings.
Worse still, the date string you get is in a format that depends on your OS localization, AND on user preferences.
To do a meaningful comparison, you have to first convert your date strings to a julian date (An integer counting the number of days since an initial reference date.) Then compare those integers together.
For that I recommend that you use the :jdate function there:
https://www.dostips.com/DtCodeCmdLib.php#Function.jdate
I have a bunch of images with different create dates. I want to normalize them all to a given date (say today's date) using a batch file (Windows). Can ExifTool set dates? I only see documentation and examples for shifting dates. To shift the date to present, I would need to somehow read the date for each file, calculate the difference, and then shift. That would be ok, but I don't know how to read the create date into a variable using ExifTool.
One obstacle for me is that I don't speak Perl. I do Python, and there is pyexiv2. This allows to write the "date", but I can't see anywhere if that is just create date or all dates.
Edit
Here shows using, for example,
exiftool -AllDates='2010:08:08 15:35:33' -overwrite_original IMG_01.jpg
in Ubuntu linux, but I could not get that to work in Windows.
As a hack, I tried
exiftool -AllDates+=2015:03:02 IMG_8220.JPG
which set the dates to the time executed, probably because the shift was so completely crazy. But I'd like to have control, and, specifically be able to change YYYY:MM:DD without changing the time.
Consequently, help still appreciated.
I crossposted to the ExifTool forum, and ExifTool author Phil Harvey responded that you need to use double quotes. The single quotes from the linked blog post don't do it in Windows.
So, one would use
exiftool -AllDates="2010:08:08 15:35:33" IMG_01.jpg
I tested it and (of course) it worked.
I am making a game off Ubuntu through the terminal and one feature I would like to add is adding timestamps to the saved games.
Like the game would display "Save: (time)" and in time would be (DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM) is there a simple way to do this?
In order to get the current date you can use the command date. See man date for more format options.
$ date +'%d/%m/%y %T'
26/10/13 16:29:56
In case you would like to compute the timestamp from C++, see how to get local time and put it in a string.
I would like to write WinSCP script to download a file that is placed onto the remote server every morning between 4-4:30am. Is there a way to do this with time-stamping?
I want to pseudocode:
get file.txt where timestap<1 hour from 4 am
First, I assume your file does not have fixed name (contrary to your question with fixed name file.txt). If not, please explain, why do you need timestamp-based solution.
Anyway, you can use a file mask with a time constraint:
get "*.txt>2014-07-19 4:00"
To dynamically inject today's date, use the %TIMESTAMP% syntax:
get "*.txt>%TIMESTAMP#yyyy-mm-ss% 4:00"
Simply, the above means, get all files created later than 4:00 today (the %TIMESTAMP#yyyy-mm-ss% resolves to today's date in format yyyy-mm-ss, as needed for the time constraint).
When passing the get on WinSCP command-line in a batch file (using /command switch, as opposite to using /script switch to specify a separate script file), you have to double the % to avoid the batch-file trying to interpret the %TIMESTAMP%:
winscp.com /command ... "get ""*.txt>%%TIMESTAMP#yyyy-mm-ss%% 4:00"""
Another solution is a static script that rely on a relative time: E.g. you know your script runs at 6am. So you let WinSCP download all files updated/created in the last 2 hours (6am – 4am):
get *.txt>2h
See also WinSCP article on downloading the most recent file.
Is there a LaTeX command that prints the "last modified" date of the actual document? Since LaTeX projects consist of more than one file this command ideally prints the date of the actual file, not that of the project.
pdfTeX provides the primitive \pdffilemoddate to query this information for files. (LuaTeX uses its own Lua functions for the same thing.) Since pdfTeX is used by default in all LaTeX distributions in the last few years (at least), there's no harm in using the new functionality unless you're dealing with very old production systems. Here's an example:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\def\parsedate #1:20#2#3#4#5#6#7#8\empty{20#2#3/#4#5/#6#7}
\def\moddate#1{\expandafter\parsedate\pdffilemoddate{#1}\empty}
this is the moddate: \moddate{\jobname.tex}
\end{document}
(Assuming the file has been modified since year 2000.)
The package filemod seems to do exactly what you need. To get the last modified date of the file you just include the package in the usual way:
\usepackage{filemod}
and the modification time of the current document is printed by:
\filemodprintdate{\jobname}
you can also print the modification time, and there are many options to format the output.
Unfortunately, TeX does not provide commands for such information; the only way to get such information is
by running a non-TeX script to create a TeX file before running LaTeX and including this file in your main LaTeX document somehow, or
by running the external script from TeX (which only works if the so-called write18 or shellescape feature is enabled; you'd have to consult the manual of your TeX implementation for this, and not have a stubborn sysadmin).
It is possible that extended TeXs do support file info commands (luaTeX perhaps?), but it's not part of TeX proper.
If you are using an automated build system, you could ask it to generate a file (perhaps named today.sty) which depends on all the source files.
In make that might look like:
today.sty: $LATEX_SRCS
echo "\date{" > $#
date +D >> $#
echo "}" >> $#
and \usepackage{today.sty}.
The will use the date of the first build after a file changes, and won't update until either you delete today.sty or alter another source file.
thank dmckee
LATEX_SRCS = test.tex
define moddate
date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S
endef
today.sty: $(LATEX_SRCS)
#echo "\def\moddate{"$(shell $(moddate))"}"> $#
There is the getfiledate LaTeX package (it was part of my LaTeX distribution by default). It seems to be designed to automatically output a paragraph like:
The date of last modification of file misc-test1.tex was 2009-10-11 21:45:50.
with a bit of ability to tweak the output. You can definitely get just the date. However, I couldn't figure out how to get rid of newlines around the date and how to change the date format. To be honest I think the authors implemented it exactly for the single purpose they needed it, and it is rather cumbersome for general use.