All,

I have an expect script that moves files from one server to another which works perfectly. But now i need to make a change where it goes into a directory where the date changes daily, exp: filedir.latestdate, and looks for a file whos name changes daily as well, exp: uploadfile.latestdate.

Anyone know how i can script in expect to beable to determine the latest directory and can get the latest version of a file?

Below is an example of my script so far:

#!/usr/bin/expect

# Expect script to sftp files to a remote server.

spawn sftp user@hostname
expect "password:"
send "password\n"
expect "sftp>"
send "cd /local/tmp/ \r"
expect "sftp>"
send "put test.txt \r"
expect "sftp>"
send "exit\r"

I'm not at my system right now, but I believe if you look at the man page for date, there are output format options. I'd either put it in YYYYMMDD format (easy human-readable, and will make sorting files easy too). That would be good if you only had one file per day.

If you had more than one file, you could do YYYYMMDDhhmm. Assigning the date variable in your script should be easy.

Thanks, i dont think that will know to define what the latest date is though

What are the filenames like ie what is the date pattern?
If you can define your own, use YYYYMMDD, as it sorts naturally

ls|sort|head -1

If you only have relevant files in the dir and they are not messed around with after being created, then you can use

ls -t|head -1

That was my thought exactly, Chrism01.

So this has changed a little bit to make it easier, so i need to be able to just find the latest version of a file instead of both the directory and the file.

The file looks like this with ls:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 userid userid 1564 Oct 7 10:01 server.log.2008-10-07

So in expect how do i tell sftp to just get the latest server.log according to the date?

Thanks!

I don't think you can ask sftp (or any ftp) to run a remote script to find the latest file. Its not what ftp is for.
If the files are rpoduced regularly eg you expect 1 per day, then you can either:

1. keep the latest file locally (or a note somewhere) and calc the next name for sftp if you get irregularly
or
2. just calc from the current date if you sftp every day

I've used (1.) several times in the past, its more flexible & you can redo if the last one was corrupt.

HTH

Right, keeing it locally is what i want to do but i still have to copy it from the remote server so it will be local. So how do you automate that, grabbing the newest file?

Need answers:

1. are the files produced on an expected schedule?
2. do the files a have predictable datestamp in the filename?


Different solns work depending on the answers to those qns. See my previous post.

Look at my post on 10/08 for how the date is listed in the file.

So like I said, if you know the date format in the filename you just calc the (expected) date of the newest file and try to sftp it. Just keep the latest file or a note so you know next time what to expect.
Start from your current file, if any.
If you haven't got any files yet, either manually get the first one, or just pick a date in the past (as far back as you need to go) and then keep looping until you run out of files or reach today's date, whichever comes first.

If you want to calc dates purely in bash, see here

http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell/ssr/...-Game.shtml#s6

although you could prob manage with
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.b...1c273d1f5cd2ce

OK so ive got it almost figured out, in bash script you can do:

date=date=`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`
rsync -avz -e ssh userid@remoteserver:/tmp.$date /home/userid

i tried to set the date variable in Expect but no go. Anyone know how to make this work in expect? This is what i have below:

set date=`date "+%Y-%m-%d"` date
spawn rsync -avz -e ssh userid@remoteserver:/tmp.$date /home/userid

On the flipside, if no one knows this answer, anyone know how i can pass the password from a shell script, no i cant generate keys to make it passwordless. Its not an option. Thanks!

Sorry about the confusion

I dont know what to really make of that post jilinkels, i can find links myself but those links dont even have anything to do with what i asked. So... (scratches head)

I didn't post to show those links, I edited and removed to content of the post. Look at the reason for editing.

I made some suggestions about how to tackle this problem using Expect. After that I did some testing and found out that both SSH and FTP send a whole lot of stray characters which makes it next to impossible for Expect to recognize a usable string.

If I had let it here it would have confused you even more.

jlinkels