Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

TOPIC: CONSUMER

Automating FTP I: UNIX and Linux

11^th April 2008

Having got tired of repeated typing in everything at the prompt of an interactive command line FTP session and doing similar things via the 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 username 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 ~

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