This is the first bash script I wrote, I used crontab to periodically backup and compress a mysqldb in a shared hosting environment

#!/bin/sh
user=testdbuser
password=testdb
dbname=testdb
location=~/db_backups
ts=$(date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M')

mysqldump -u$user -p$password --opt $dbname > $location/temp-$ts.sql
cd $location
tar -cvzf $dbname-db-$ts.tar.gz temp-$ts.sql
rm -f temp-$ts.sql