Bash script error trying to write to file: no such file or directory

Question

I'm getting an error with a very simple script. The script should run pg_dumpall and write the output to a file but I'm getting an error that the resulting file doesn't exist. I know it doesn't exist, thats why I want to creat it! :-/

#!/bin/bash
#remove previous day's dump and create new
rm -f /home/user/db_dump_*.txt;
pg_dumpall -U postgres -w > /home/user/db_dump_`date '+%d/%m/%Y_%H:%M:%S'`.txt;

The result is:

db_dump.sh: line 4: /home/user/db_dump_12/02/2017_14:30:15.txt: No such file or directory 

The date command is working fine and the filename comes out perfect but instead of the file being created, I get the error saying that it doesn't exist. I'm running the script as root so there should be no issues with permissions. I can write to the user's home directory without any problems.

Any ideas?

Solution

Check that generated filename again:

/home/user/db_dump_12/02/2017_14:30:15.txt

It tries to write into a subdirectory called 02 of db_dump_12. If these directories don't exist, you'll get a "No such file or directory" error.

I suggest using another date format:

dumpfile_date=$( date +"%F-%T" ) # or %Y%m%d-%H%M%S or something similar
pg_dumpall -U postgres -w > "/home/user/db_dump_$dumpfile_date.txt"

Comments

[Celada]

Since your filename contains slashes, try pre-creating the directories involved before trying to write to a file inside them. In this instance, mkdir -p /home/user/db_dump_12/02. On the other hand, I urge you to reconsider your directory structure as it doesn't seem logical to, say, keep all of the files written on the 12th of any month in a given directory. Perhaps if your date format were big-endian instead oflittle-endian it might make more sense.

[rijo79]

derp... Yeah, that'll do it... Slashes in the date are gonna be read as a path...

[rijo79]

I just replaced the slashes with hyphens in the date parameters and it works the way I want. Thanks!