Hi,
I made a shell script with the following piece of code to transfer some files via ftp:

The problem is that the script ends after the "quit" command in FTP, so code after it won't run, like the remove of temporary files. If I remove this "quit" command, the shell understands I'm still parsing commands to FTP, although being after the EOF. I used this echo commands to check which parts of the script are running.

Do somebody have a clue of why is this happening?

Thank you,
Josep Maria

It's not really that the commands afterwards aren't being run.. it's that the here-doc never actually ends. The EOF token cannot be indented.

I haven't got the manpage handy, but I assume the script exits because the ftp is returning a non-zero exit status. One way around that is to change the invokation of ftp to something like:

ftp <whatever args> || /bin/true

scripting the generic ftp client this way is a lot more effort than using an ftp client meant for batch work though- I would have a look at something like ncftpput, from the ncftp package. Way less headache.

tuxdev, you're right, here-docs mustn't be indented. But problem persists after removing the space.

Sure it's less headache, tried ncftpput and now it works.
Thanks to both of you!

The first thing I'd try is to remove the "quit" That may not help, but I'm unclear why you need it since your input ends anyway.

If you open an ftp session with the ftp command in a shell, you use the quit command to end the ftp session. I understand quit is needed in order to close the connection, and all posts I read with code on ftp transfers in scripts use it. What I don't understand is why the script terminates with this "quit" being inside the here-doc.

Indeed it should not terminate. My guess is that it still cannot interpret the EOF at the end of the here document, as previously suggested by tuxdev. Be sure the ftp part of your script loosk like:
the closing EOF must be at the very beginning of the line (no spaces before) unless you use another form of the "here document" syntax as explained in the Advanced Bash User Guide (but this is another story for now).

Moreover, take in mind that you can quickly debug your script using the -x option of bash. This will put on the standard output every command executed by the shell after expansions and substitutions being performed. In this way you can check what the shell actually executes. To do this, either launch the script as in:
or add -x in the sha-bang at the beginning of the script itself:
I suggest to test a reduced version of the script, containing only the ftp part (as shown in your post) and the variable assignments before that.

Ouch! Thank you colucix, I misunderstood tuxdev. I thought the restriction of spaces was with the opening token, not the closing one.
I've tested it with the closing EOF at the very beginning of the line and it works.

Thank you!!