How to append text to file every morning?

Question

I would like to append current date to text file every morning at 7am. if the computer is turned off I would like it to be executed after its turned on.

Answer 1

Write

#!/bin/bash
date +%Y-%m-%d >> /path/to/file

Save that in a file under /etc/cron.daily/ and make it executable. It's important that the file does not have an extension.

The files in /etc/cron.daily/ are run daily by anacron in the morning (not exactly 7am, but around then) or during boot if it hasn't already been run that day.

Answer 2

setup a cron job with the following bash script

#!/bin/bash
touch lastexecution
if [ '`date +"%Y%m%d"`' != '`cat lastexecution`' ]; then
  echo `date +"%Y%m%d"`>>datefile
  echo `date +"%Y%m%d"`>lastexecution
fi

execute this script at bootup and at 7 o'clock. To keep things simple, this script also writes the current date if the computer boots up before 7 o'clock, but only once a day. It creates two files: lastexecution which holds the date of the last time the batch file wrote the date into the file and datefile, where it appends the current date.