I am writing a script to do a speed measurement from my ISP's test ftp server. To do this interactively I connect to the server, enter credentials, enable hash and download a test file. The process concludes with something like
So I entered the credentials for the server in my .netrc file and created a little bash script as follows
The script executes as expected EXCEPT that I do not see the statistics at the end of the transfer. It terminates thusly
I have tried adding another ftp command such as ls to the end of the "here" document (in case the results were clipped by the bye command) but to no avail. The ls result immediately follows the ### - no stats I am at a loss. Any suggestions from the community?

TIA,

Ken

Well, to answer my own question....

I added -v (verbose) to the ftp command. I get a bunch of other data which I do not want but I do get the stats I am looking for at the end of the process.

I will leave this thread open to see if someone else has a better idea.

Thanks again,

Ken

wget is a good solution:
You can of course change the -O parameter, use ftp://<filename> to download.

jlinkels

Thanks jlinkels,

I have played with wget in the past - don't remember why. If I am in a real hurry to download something I use Internet Download Manager in an XP virtual machine. It will suck every possible bps from my DSL connection. It will queue many jobs, download all links from a web page, restart downloads etc. I think I looked into wget when I could not get IDM to work under wine. I now have enough horsepower (i7-860 CPU and 8 GB of RAM) to run a virtual machine all the time just in case I need do run a Windows program.

For the purposes of my speed test script - it does what I need. When something seems really slow (as Ubuntu updates were this morning) I can simply fire up the script and get a quick read on my connection throughput.

Regards,

Ken

The problem might be that a script is running in a non interactive shell
you can try if adding a i to the first line #!/bin/bash -i to force a interactive shell
solves your problem, or add a ! to ftp ! 63.162.xxx.xxx to invoke a interactive shell.

Regards,
Emilio

Thanks Emilio,

I will give this a try and post my results.

Ken

Unfortunately the -i interactive shell did not have any effect. And, the ftp ! did not connect. Thanks anyhow for the suggestions.

Ken