hi.. just joined in.
im trying to ftp log files from remote host to my local machine. before i am using winscp, however, just recently i can no longer use it, says that the files in the directory are too long to list. so, i thought of having a simple script using awk to get what was just being requested to be ftp'd.

my objective is: select the range by month (e.g Dec 2012 - Feb 2013), move it a temp directory, then ftp the entire directory to the local machine.

as of to date, i am stuck with just printing the file of only one month.

#ls -lrt *.log | awk '/Feb/ {print $6 $7 $8 $9}'

your inputs are highly appreciated

BTW, as far as GUIs go, have you tried Filezilla?

My main concern is the use of processing ls output as this can have issues, especially if there is white space in any of the file names.

You mention you wish to move the files to a new location and then upload the directory so I am not sure why you are returning multiple fields?
May I suggest you look at using find and you can research either using the name format to retrieve your files and / or the creation / modification times.

@chrism01: no haven't tried it.

@grail: i have included the other fields so i could see the time-stamps, since i was only able to print the files. can you suggest a sample script using find? i am just wondering why would i use find when i already know where are the target files to be ftp'd. besides awk can be more useful on filtering specific fields.

how i will be able to set the output of the awk command to a variable.
like: a='awk output'; then cp a /home/ or something of the sort.

this is my progress (without progressing )


ls -lrt | awk '/Feb/ {print $6" "$7" "$8" "$9}' | xargs -I -t cp {} test
cp: cannot stat `{}': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `{}': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `{}': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `{}': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `{}': No such file or directory

input from other members will be highly appreciated.
looking forward to have this issue solved. thanks

As I pointed out, you only need $9 ie the filename. It doesn't make sense to 'cp' the other fields ls -lrt returns.

The "-I" option to xargs needs a parameter --- Add {} to it so that xargs knows where the substitution is to take place.

Can you try find cmd:

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or, if you want to search by date,

I second grail's suggestion on avoiding parsing ls. There are almost always better techniques available for what you want to do.

What do the filenames look like, exactly? If the names have dates included in them, then it shouldn't be too hard to parse out the ones you want, either with find or shell globbing.

It would be even better if the dates are in the ISO 8601 standard structure (non-hyphenated is best).

On the other hand, if you need to locate the files by mtime, find is definitely the way to go, as shivva and millgates have demonstrated. You shouldn't need to use xargs then, just the built-in -exec action.

Speaking of which, if you have gnu find available, check out the -newerXY option, which lets you bypass creating a reference file first:

also, instead of using the antiquated insecure and un-scriptable ftp command, you can backtick the output of the previous command into scp and cron it whenever you like: