I’ve started using a neat Bash trick for inserting time stamps into file names — insert a timestamp using command substitution (posix specification):
wp db export example.com--$(date +%Y-%m-%d--%H-%M-%S).sql # gives something like example.com-2017-09-11--14-26-21.sql
Yes, this is a pain to type out — the first time.
But going to the effort of writing this out allows us to quickly recall a command which gives us a filename with a “now” time stamp.
I didn’t learn about using ctrl+r in bash until fairly recently. If you don’t know about it, you can do a reverse search through your bash history. Using the above command substitution technique, I can recall a previous dump with a ‘now’ timestamp with just a few keystrokes:
<ctrl+r> wp db ex<enter>
See the below screencast for an example.
I find this particularly helpful with database dumps and tar creation commands!