Very Computer

Hi folks,

I am not a unix guy but have to get this thing working. I have a Sun
Box & want to automatically rename a file as soon as it is created in
the specified directory. The name has to be a unique filename
identified by creation date/time.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Sheetal

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I take it you don't have source code for the program that's creating
the files?

The obvious solution - getting a notification of a new file - isn't
available in Unix. You'd have to poll the directory periodically for
new files. The trick there would be to recognise a new file from the
ones you've already renamed.

Assuming that the names you want to give the new files are of the form
'yyyymmddhhmmss', and that you can guarantee that the program creating
the files won't ever give one a name like that, you could probably
work out a way to stat(2) all the files in the directory periodically,
and rename any that don't meet your needs based on the timestamp
returned by stat().

Look at the man page for stat(2) (ie, run the command 'man 2 stat').

Whether you're a Unix guy, NT gal, Mac dog or VMS frog, you've to read manuals
and learn howto do things yourself ;)

Quote:> I have a Sun
> Box & want to automatically rename a file as soon as it is created in
> the specified directory. The name has to be a unique filename
> identified by creation date/time.

I'd use this - You can get the PID of the process that's creating the file
from a shell by using "$$", and get the number of seconds since Jan. 1st 1970
using date '+s' (I think that's what it does...), so a command like

touch foobar.$$.`date '+%s'`

should create a unique filename, in the example which I just tried out on my
workstation, I got this file created.
foo.23097.946046140

Seems pretty unique to me  - Unless you happen to spawn off tens of thousands
of new processes in a second on your machine, I reckon you're safe enough.

Hope this helps :)

Brian.
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