Backup files before editing

It's a fact that many text editors (or word processors) have the ability to keep a backup copy of every file you edit, just to assure you that you can always restore the previous version of the file. This is usually implemented by creating a copy of the file with a file extension of .bak or by appending a "~" character at the end of the current file extension, like .c~

Although being a useful option for a programmer (or a writer), it lacks the capability of keeping more backup copies, like a CVS (Concurrent Versions System) where the author can go back in time and find the text file as is was e.g. a month ago (very handy if you want to restore something you have deleted just before one week).

In order to avoid the complexity of a CVS, yet having the option to "travel" back in time, I wrote a small shell script, which I'm running just before my editing sessions. The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
datetime=`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M`
bdir=".backup"

mkdir $bdir 2> /dev/null

for a in $*; do
cp -av $a $bdir/$datetime.$a
done
gzip -9 $bdir/$datetime.*

All it does is to keep a compressed copy of every file you want to edit in a directory named ".backup", hence I named it "backup2.backup" and I run it as:

backup2.backup *.php *.html

It doesn't check many things, but I'm using it for some time now. Feel free to enhance it as you like it.