Hi guys,

I am in the middle of trying to write my first script. I have created
a command using sed and grep to grab a list of ftp hosts from a host file. Now I want to test the ftp connection of the hosts that have been returned after running the command.

grep host config.xml | sed 's/<//g;s/>//g;s/host//g;s/[/]//g' | sort | uniq -d | ftp ftp.hostname.com

I get the below error

Unknown AUTH type.
Unknown AUTH type.
KERBEROS_V4 rejected as an authentication type
Password:Name (ftp.hostname.com:username):

Any feedback will be much appreciated

well what feedback do you want, and what test do you want to perform? Ultimately the script appears to work - you've cleary got no way to enter usernames and passwords in that one liner, so naturally the ftp server is going to need authentication.

scp with keys will probably give you more mileage.

Hi Guys, Thansk for yor reply . apologies for not making this sound clear. So basically I want to be able to test the connection to all the ftp host that has been outputed. I dont need to log in to the ftp host, I am after a "connected" reply just like if I ran the ftp command from a command line. see example below

$ ftp ftp.hostname.com
Connected to ftp.hostname.com.
220 Newedge ftp service
504 Unknown AUTH type.
504 Unknown AUTH type.
KERBEROS_V4 rejected as an authentication type
Name (ftp.hostname.com:user):

Does that help?

i'd use nmap in that case, it'd give you very simple non-interactive scan over a range of addresses and be able to do some basic ftp interaction to validate a level of availability. curl could also be useful, I certainly would use the ftp client itself.

Not to be too picky and I know you are new, but the grep really is unnecessary.
If you can give us a demo of the xml line containing what you want, your sed can probably be tidied up too

Hi Guys,

Sorry for late reply, I had some personal issues to deal with.

I have a text file that has a list of FTP hostnames, I want to create a script that will read each line that has the FTP address, and then test the FTP connection using NETCAT. I then want to publish the result of the test (output) in another file, showing SUCCESS or FAILURE next to each FTP site that has been tested.

Does that make sense?

Yes it makes sense, although does not appear to be what you demonstrated in your original question.

Based on your last post the pseudo code would be:

loop over file with hostnames
netcat each address from file and test for success
redirect output to a new file