Author Archive

There has been some activity recently in an old 2007 post I wrote about creating a date and time stamp in your batch files.

Well, the funny part was that I said ‘Date and Time’ in the subject, but I only talked about pulling out the current date.

Sue asked “What if I need both date, and time?”

Good question. What if you want to create a file that has the current date and time for each execution of the script?

In my old article I was creating zip files, using an imaginary command line based zip program. So in my article here I am going to make our goal to zip up a folder and name it:

YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_DATA.zip

If it were run today, our script should create a file by this name:

20091111143900_DATA.zip

To accomplish this, you need to use substring batch codes. If you want more detail on how these work, I explain it in the original article:

Create a date and time stamp in your batch files

To get the current time we use the %TIME% environment variable, and %DATE% for the date.

Using the substring batch codes from my old article, this is how we would pull out the year, month and day:

%date:~-4,4%%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%

How about the time? That can be a little more difficult since the numbers returned from the time are not always the same length. For example, if it is 9 o’clock, it will say 9:00 – not 09:00. This will cause trouble when using the value for our filename.

Before we deal with that space, let me show you the substring codes to pull out the time:

Milliseconds: %time:~-2,2%
Seconds: %time:~-5,2%
Minutes: %time:~-8,2%
Hours: %time:~-11,2%

So naturally, if we wanted HHMMSS we could take those values above and put them side by side:

%time:~-11,2%%time:~-8,2%%time:~-5,2%

But like I said before, the hours can give you trouble because of the space. I came up with this code to pull off the space:

SET HOUR=%time:~-11,2%
Call :TRIM %HOUR%
GOTO :EOF
:TRIM
Set HOUR=%*
:EOF
REM You would use your trimmed hour right here
@echo %HOUR%

So, pulling it all together, how would we get an environment variable filled with a good date and time stamp filename?

Here is the code:
REM Get the hour first and put in an environment var

SET HOUR=%time:~-11,2%
Call :TRIM %HOUR%
GOTO :EOF
:TRIM
Set HOUR=%*
:EOF

REM Create our timestamp filename variable
SET DATESTMP=%date:~-4,4%%date:~-10,2%%date:~-7,2%%HOUR%
SET FILENAME=%DATESTMP%%time:~-8,2%%time:~-5,2%_DATA.ZIP

REM This is just an example call using our new filename
REM -=The real PKZIP program probably uses a different command line syntax
pkzip.exe c:\ImportantFolder\*.* c:\ZIPFILES\%FILENAME%

Using the code above, you can easily generate new files using the date and time in your batch script.

Original Article from www.networksteve.com