We have an internal system for allocating hardware to developers on a short term basis. While the software does have a web API, it is not enabled by default, nor in our deployment. Thus, we end up caching a local copy of the data about the machine. The machine names are a glom of architecture, and location. So I make a file with the name of the machine, and a symlink to the one I am currently using.

when run from inside a console/ssh session will tell you the ipmi address of the machine you are on.

It is rare that you want to write something without later wanting to be able to read it back. One common way of organizing files that are generated regularly is by time stamp. If you want to add a timestamp to a file name, you can do so using the date command.

In order for the filenames to sort in the right order, you want the name to go from largest unit to smallest.

Here is an example that creates a filename-suitable string formed Year->second. I remove all unnecessary formatting characters.

date --rfc-3339=seconds | sed -E -e 's! |-|:!!g'

The date command reads the current date/time on the local system. –rfc-3339=seconds produces output that looks like this:

$ date --rfc-3339=seconds 
2021-11-03 10:57:14-04:00

In order to keep the regular expression concise inside the sed command, the -E switch tells it to use extended regular expressions, including the alternation character ‘|’ . Thus, the regex ‘ |-|:’ matches a space, a dash, and a colon.