Getting formatted date into variable in batch file

There are many times I create a batch file to do backups of a deployment before I do a new deployment. I want to keep the history of deployment backups, so I want to include the current date and time in the filename. I could not believe how incredibly different and complex the solutions were for this when I Googled it. I am doing this on my own machine or at least environments that I know so this batch file doesn't have to worry about this working on all machines with different date formats, etc. The script can be adjusted to work on any date format, but it will not work as is on all date formats. As it turns outs there is already a variable with the date and another with time in it called %date% and %time%. You can see this by typing echo %date% %time% at a command prompt. On my machine this returns a string like the following: Tue 07/29/2008 11:30:10.54 A little know bit of functionality built into the command prompt (at least in XP and maybe earlier) is substring functionality. It uses zero based indexes. Using the previous example we can reformat the output to be just about anything we want. As an example lets do 2008-07-29--11.30. To do this we would do the following echo %date:~10,4%-%date:~4,2%-%date:~7,2%--%time:~0,2%.%time:~3,2% Now if you want to use this in a script that zips a directory and gives the filename with the current date and time here is what you could do: set NOW=%date:~10,4%-%date:~4,2%-%date:~7,2%--%time:~0,2%.%time:~3,2% zip -r c:\myApp%NOW%BU.zip \\myserver\myapp