I have a habit of making daily course notes using (Probably not the most suitable way for you readers). By using this Makefile script I can automatically generate date based file, and avoiding overriding the current date notes.
Because I have an folder structure like this:
~/ study/ termX/ course1/ course2/ termY/
In this structure I can copy this Makefile to anywhere.
LC = pdflatex NAME = $(shell date +%Y%m%d) TEMPLATE = template.tex all: make make: $(NAME).tex pdflatex $(NAME).tex xdg-open $(NAME).pdf create: $(TEMPLATE) if [ ! -e `date +%Y%m%d`.tex ]; \ then \ cp $(TEMPLATE) `date +%Y%m%d`.tex; \ fi; vim `date +%Y%m%d`.tex clean: rm -f *.aux *.log *.out
The usage is very clear, the default is to compile a tex file to PDF.
You still need to write a tex template called template.tex for this to work.