Automating FTP I: UNIX and Linux

11th April 2008

Having gotten tired of repeated typing in everything at the prompt of an interactive command line FTP session and doing similar things via GUI route, I started to wonder if there was a scripting alternative and, lo and behold, I found it after a spot of googling. There are various opportunities for its extension such as prompting for user name and password instead of the risky approach of including them in a script or cycling through a directory structure but here’s the foundation stone for such tinkering anyway:

HOSTNAME=’ftp.server.host’
USER=’user’
PSSWD=’password’
REP_SRC=’source_directory’
REP__DEST=’destination_directory’
FILENAME=’*’

rm -rf log_file.tmp

cd "${REP_DEST}"

ftp -i -n -v <<EndFTP >>log_file.tmp 2>>log_file.tmp
open ${HOSTNAME}
user ${USER} ${PSSWD}
prompt
cd "${REP_SRC}"
mget "${FILENAME}"
EndFTP

cd ~

Comments:

atul tandon says:
January 14, 2009 at 1:29 am
how to I ftp from unix to linux.
John says:
January 14, 2009 at 10:33 am
Supposing that there is an FTP server running on the UNIX side, all that’s needed is to use ftp commands or something like FileZilla if you prefer a GUI.

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Automating FTP I: UNIX and Linux

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