bash - Creating tar file and naming by current date

Question

I'm trying to create a backup script in bash, to tar the contents of a folder and move the resulting file somewhere, but I don't really know how to do it.

#!/bin/bash
name="$date +"%y-%m-%d""
tar -zcvf $name code

But the result is that the file is just named +%y-%m-%d. How can I change the script to name the file by the date as intended?

Intended output: 2013-08-29.tar

Answer 1

Like this:

name=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')
tar -zcvf "$name.tar.gz" code

or even in one line:

tar -zcvf "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d').tar.gz" code

Drop -z flag if you want .tar instead of .tar.gz.

Use %y instead of %Y if you want just 2 digits of a year (17 instead of 2017).

$() is used for command substitution.