Weekly Script

This little script helps when you need to run a certain script (like a backup) weekly. I use this to backup my databases and keep a week of window between them. I do my backups twice a day, from Monday through Friday, and the backup done in Monday will only get overridden in the next Monday.

Using It

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/nerde/weekly.git

Create your script:

cd weekly
cp execute.example execute
vim execute

In it, type whatever you want to do when the script gets run. The first parameter in this script will be a destination directory guessed by the main script (we'll talk about this one later):

echo $1 # Will print something like ./2-Tuesday_08-33

The second one will contain just the "day" part:

echo $2 # Will print something like 2-Tuesday_08-33

Running It

To run this, you will not call directly your own execute script. You will call the main script instead:

./run

By default, the destination path will be where the run script is, concatenated with the "day/hour" part. You may want to change this behaviour. To do that, you just need to pass a single parameter to the run script in order to tell it where you want the destination to be:

./run ~/backup

This way, the first parameter in the execute script will be /home/user/backup/2-Tuesday_08-33. The second one will be the same.

Crontab

Now, the magic really happens when you use it with your crontab. There, you can define when you want the script to be run:

crontab -e

To run my backups, I use something like this:

30 12,19 * * 1-5 /path/to/weekly/run /home/user/backup/

This way, my /home/user/backup folder will have the following directories:

1-Monday_12-30
1-Monday_19-30
2-Tuesday_12-30
2-Tuesday_19-30
3-Wednesday_12-30
3-Wednesday_19-30
4-Thursday_12-30
4-Thursday_19-30
5-Friday_12-30
5-Friday_19-30

In each one I have the corresponding backup and it will get replaced only once a week. This way, if I have to go back in time, I can do it up to one week ago.