Change Permissions and Execute

Once the file is created you can change the permissions of the file so that only you can execute the file. You can do this using chmod:

bash$ chmod 700 datedir.sh

Now that you have set the permissions so that the shell script can execute, let's run it:

bash$ ./datedir.sh

Since this file wrote all of its contents to another file called logfile, we can see the contents of the file by using cat to view it:

bash$ cat logfile
Wed Mar 20 17:39:54 HST 2002
total 64
drwx------    5 bob      bob      4096 Mar 20 17:39 .
drwxr-xr-x    5 root     root     4096 Feb 26 10:33 ..
-rw-------    1 bob      bob       416 Mar 19 16:34 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--    1 bob      bob        24 Feb 26 10:33 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--    1 bob      bob       224 Feb 26 10:33 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--    1 bob      bob       124 Feb 26 10:33 .bashrc
-rw-r--r--    1 bob      bob      5450 Feb 26 10:33 .canna
-rwx------    1 bob      bob        33 Mar 20 17:39 datedir.sh
drwxr-xr-x    2 bob      bob      4096 Feb 26 10:33 Desktop
-rw-r--r--    1 bob      bob       747 Feb 26 10:33 .emacs
drwxr-xr-x    3 bob      bob      4096 Feb 26 10:33 .kde
-rw-r--r--    1 bob      bob        29 Mar 20 17:39 logfile
-rw-r--r--    1 bob      bob      3728 Feb 26 10:33 .screenrc
-r--r--r--    1 bob      bob      1019 Feb 26 10:33 .wl
drwx------    2 bob      root     4096 Mar 19 15:38 .xauth

You can see that this file contains the date as the first line, then the directory listing is appended onto the end. You can change this shell script so that it does a backup or many other things.