I'd be interested in seeing your how you solved it with the date and
cut command? What date format were you looking for?
We all know there are a thousand ways to do the same thing without
there being a definite right way, but here is what I came up with (I
did it from the command line, but you could easily make a script out of
it):

$ cd /path/to/source/files
$ d=`date +%Y%m%d`
$ for i in `find . -type f`
>do
>mv $i /file/to/new/files/$i.$d
>done
$


T.