This is a short shell script to make date named directories.
#!/bin/sh
a=`TZ=UTC-1 date +%y%m%d-%T`;b=${a#*-};c=${b#*:}
mkdir -v ${a%-*}`printf %04d $(echo "((${b%%:*}*60+${c%:*})*60+${c#*:})/8.64"|bc)`|grep -Eo \[0-9]+
Just run the script and it will create the directory and print back the name. If you run it in very quick succession (within a 9 second window) you may get an error back stating that the directory already exists. For human activity (rather than automation) this is typically good enough and keeps the name shorter. If you need an additional directory, just wait a few seconds and try again. 🤷🏼
ℹ️ If you want to create and switch to a directory in one go, issue cd `mdd` (where "mdd" is the script name).
I often make directories during the day named things like, "temp", "test" or "deleteme". This can get annoying when I forget to cleanup and then find myself reissuing mkdir and trying to make "temp2", "test13", etc. … or I end up just smashing the keyboard to create directories named like "jhjkdsh". 😆 [And, yes I know about about mktemp]
This script should work better for my use case as it will create a date named directory and print the name back to me. Later when looking on disk it also gives me some quick context of when I made this directory, without having to look at extended meta data (i.e. I can see when I made a directory via a simple ls rather than having to issue ls -l [which could be different anyway as that reports modification time, not creation time]). It also helps should I want to do any mass cleanup, due to predictable naming.
I am using Swatch .beats [actually I am using "decibeats", i.e. .beats to one decimal place or a tenth of a full .beat] rather than traditional hour, minute and seconds because it is super nerdy 🤓 and keeps the filename short.
ℹ️ If .beats are too wierd for you, just remove the TZ=UTC-1 part from the script and you can read the last four digits as the percentage of day complete (to two decimal places), in your local timezone. This is slightly easier for most people to relate to, for example:
- 0% [midnight] → 25% [06:00] is early morning
- 25% → 48% [11:31] is late morning
- ≅ 50% lunch time
- 52% [12:28 (PM)] → 75% [18:00 (6PM)] is afternoon
- Over 75% is into the evening and night
Alternatively you could replace the entire script with mkdir -v $(date '+%y%m%d%H%M'). The names will remain equally concise but the last four digits are now simply the hour and the minute. However, you will only get a single minute resolution for time creation, which might be annoying for creating many directories back to back. Or perhaps you might want to use UNIX times via mkdir -v $(date '+%s')? Here the downside being that this time format is incomprehensible at a glance to all but ultra geeks [that is not an insult, congrats to you if you can!].
And finally of course there is the classic from coreutils mktemp -d but by default the folder will be randomly named (and longer), get stored within "/tmp" on Linux† and have "700" (drwx------) permissions.
[Although much of this is configurable with various options (which you can make permanent via a shell alias), it still isn't quite what I personally want. I do not want random naming of any kind, as it is easier for me later with the context of the date stamp should I do choose to keep these around for a bit and in my workflow, I sometimes do. Twisting mktemp to do exactly what I need becomes more convoluted than just using mkdir directly with my script.]
† And other fixed locations on different *nix variants like macOS.
Two things :