Brilliant. Thank you very much. That does exactly what I wanted.

"Pegasus (MVP)" wrote:

>
> "simonc" <simonc@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:46F83B7E-DDE0-4A81-A0AF-A2C2790C3FAF@microsoft.com...
> > This is a batch programming issue, so I'm not sure if this is the right
> > newsgroup. If not, maybe someone could suggest a better one.
> >
> > In a batch file which runs a backup I want the last line to rename the log
> > file
> >
> > name_of_backup_job.txt to
> >
> > name_of_backup_job_today's date.txt with the date in YMD format so that
> > files will sort into order properly in a directory listing.
> >
> > How do I extract the date into a variable, and how can I get it into YMD
> > format?
> >
> > Grateful for advice.
>
> I suspect you don't mean YMD format but perhaps YYYYMMDD.
> You can do it like this:
>
> @echo off
> set D=%date:~6,4%%date:~0,2%%date:~3,2%
> echo ren name_of_backup_job.txt name_of_backup_job_%D%.txt
>
> Remove the "echo" word to activate the batch file.
> Depending on your time zone and data format, you
> may have to tune the numbers in the second line.
>
>
>