Ryan wrote:

I looked all over, and couldn’t find anything that would let you do the previous day. It’s gotta be possible though.

I know – that’s what I thought too!! Pretty please do let us know if you do actually find anything, anything at all! I would be very grateful indeed.

It can be done and various scripts exist on the web (one such script can be found at [robvanderwoude.com]). The problem is that it’s too complex for the triviality of the issue and usually it’s recommended to not use batch files, but WSH if you need this functionality.

I looked all over, and couldn’t find anything that would let you do the previous day. It’s gotta be possible though.

I know – that’s what I thought too!! Pretty please do let us know if you do actually find anything, anything at all! I would be very grateful indeed.

Excuse my ignorance, but what would the structure be to 7za a folder with the previous day’s date on it?

I can help with making a file timestamped for the current date, but I don’t think I know how to make one timestamped for the previous day.

It is actually rather simple – all you have to do is insert the following prompts into the filename (within the batch file):

Current hour: %TIME:~0,2%
Current minute: %TIME:~3,2%
Current second: %TIME:~6,2%
Current day of week: %DATE:~0,3%
Current month: %DATE:~4,2%
Current day date: %DATE:~7,2%
Current year (2 digit): %DATE:~-2%
Current year (4 digit): %DATE:~-4%
Current DOW MM/DD/YYY %date%
Current HH:MM:SS.hh %time%

(see [simultaneouspancakes.com] [xona.com] and especially [intelliadmin.com])

An example of what a batch file for creating an archive with a timestamp of the “month – day of month – year” is as follows:
.\location_of_7zip\7za.exe u -tzip “c:\location_of_archive\%DATE:~4,2%-%DATE:~7,2%-%DATE:~-2%.zip” “c:\location_of_files\*.txt”

(make sure to have the quotation marks if you choose to have spaces in the filename)

If anyone can take this to the next step and figure out how to do a similar task, but the a previous date, I’m sure there would be many grateful readers!

Thanks for helping Lappy!

No problem! I spent quite a bit of time dealing with the 7-zip command line, for the purposes of making my own batch files in order to automate backups.

Learning and effectively using 7za.exe is terrific!

I need help with the following and I appreciate if you can help me out.

Let say you have one file (*.txt) on your desktop which gets updated every month using a different name. In this case I want 7zip to create an archive every month using whatever name the file has. Can this be done?

7za.exe a *.7z “C:\Users\Ryan\Desktop\*.txt”

Yes that concept works. You can use an asterisk in place of a filename in order to specify a certain file extension. However, please be aware there are a couple of catches (see [7-zip.org]):

1) You cannot use the *.* form of a wildcard. You have to simply use a single *
2) If you chose to use certain specific archive compressions (i.e., .7z), you’ll have to use the “-ms=off” switch (disable solid mode) in order to be able to later add files to that archive.

You also may want to use the “u” command in place of the “a” command. This will guarantee that the newest version of any existing files will be updated.

In short, it should look something like this:
7za.exe u -tzip “c:\location_of_archive\archive.zip” “c:\location_of_files\*.txt”

I strongly recommend you consult the help file (7-zip.chm – seen in the screencap in the article) included in the [sourceforge.net] for all the details about command line usage.

Let say you have one file (*.txt) on your desktop which gets updated every month using a different name. In this case I want 7zip to create an archive every month using whatever name the file has. Can this be done?

7za.exe a *.7z “C:\Users\Ryan\Desktop\*.txt”