Making folders on a daily basis...

I'm setting up a network for an independent news show, and they use the same folder structure for every show. Right now the whole thing is being done manually, but I'd like to make some sort of script to make those folders every weekday in the early morning.

Is there a way of doing that?

Probably could have it run on start up, Making a script with apple script, something like it checks the date then checks to see if its a week day.. then makes the folders. Idk not really a progammer just trying to offer some assistance. Sorry if what i said was pointless, just trying to help, lol

Yes you can set up a cron job. If you are on Tiger would use launchd I suppose instead of cron but it is the same idea. I do not know how to configure launchd though.

Rather than try and explain it here I would suggest doing a google for "cron tutorial OS X" and see if you can make sense of that. If not come back and one of us should be able to give you pointers.

Here are two quick links I found (I dod not read either in detail)

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/07/02/terminal_5.html?page=2

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2001020700163714

Scripting would be the way to go, however I am too lazy to dig into AS. If this helps you try it.

If there is no need for dates, or you only change the top level. Set up the folder structure once and then at the top level ctrl click it and select create archive. This will zip the folders in their structure to be unzipped anytime.

Now that's lazy!

MacsWork said:

Scripting would be the way to go, however I am too lazy to dig into AS. If this helps you try it.

If there is no need for dates, or you only change the top level. Set up the folder structure once and then at the top level ctrl click it and select create archive. This will zip the folders in their structure to be unzipped anytime.

Now that's lazy!

Click to expand...

lol yeah... something I would do, but its not automatic.

I know you might be able to AppleAcript or even Automater. But creating a shell script and running it as a cron job would most likely be easier.

If the folder are created every Monday then cron can run the script on Monday for you. All you would need to is record the steps you do in a file.

What is the folder structure?

rman said:

What is the folder structure?

Click to expand...

06-14-2005
06-14-2005/texts
06-14-2005/images
06-14-2005/video
06-14-2005/etc

I'm using Tiger. I have some experience with Linux, so that should help me with the shell scripting job. I hope.

Here is an example of a possible shell script.

dte=`date "+ %m-%d-%y"`
mkdir -p $dte $dte/texts $dte/images $dte/video $dte/etc

Then you would need to place an entry in the crontab file to run your script once a week at certain time.

rman said:

Here is an example of a possible shell script.

dte=`date "+ %m-%d-%y"`
mkdir -p $dte $dte/texts $dte/images $dte/video $dte/etc

Then you would need to place an entry in the crontab file to run your script once a week at certain time.

Click to expand...

Minor quibble but I think it should be

dte=`date "+ %m-%d-%C%y"`

since he wants a 4 digit year.

I looked over the 4 digit year. Thanks for the correction.

am i suppose to see a difference in what kokopelli and rman wrote

PowerBookG4 said:

am i suppose to see a difference in what kokopelli and rman wrote

Click to expand...

The %C, used to designate the 2 digit century in the date string.