Suggestion on coding this kind of requirement
 

Hi,
I would like to ask suggestion from you guys on how can I achieve this requirement. I would like to connect a a public ftp server, I already have the code to connect to it via script however, my requirement is to download only files that are listed on a txt file. I could do a command such as mget file1 file2 file3...etc. But how do I feed to the ftp program the list of file names that it should download. Here is the snippet of my code. TIA.

#!/usr/bin/bash

ftp -i -n << "END"
open publicserver.com
user anonymous 123
bin
cd loc1
mget file1.asc file2.asc
bye
END
echo "ftp complete"

Add this cmd
$file_list=`cat file_list.txt`
before the ftp stuff

then amend the mget
mget $file_list

can i output an ls command such that it would fit the requirements of the mget of ftp? For example, ls /dir > file_list.txt, where in the output would be file1 file2 file3?

If you just want the entire dir, use
mget *
or
mget *.*

nope, I am not going to get all the files, only the files that are included on the list.

That's what my 1st suggestion was for ...

have already manually edited the file. thanks for your suggestion. :)

If you meant to only download files with the same name as the files in /dir on your local machine, then the answer is yes.

You could also do $files_list=`ls /dir` which amounts to the same thing.

Something like that maybe:
And in case the filenames appear in the file one per line, and ftp does not like this, just replace the "cat ...txt" command with: "tr '\n' ' ' </path/to/text/file.txt"

Yves.

Hi,
When I try to run the script, I get a $file_list.txt: no such file or directory error. I think ftp can not translate the value of my cat command...

That's where sometimes, the functionality of some commands doesn't let the programmer have control of.
Here's a simple in Perl too where there's more "control" ...

Thanks for suggesting perl but is there another way for bash shell to do it?

What exactly did you write?

ftp is not evaluating $(...) constructs, bash is. But you have to write it exactly so, with '$(' at the start of the command, and ')' at the end.

Yves.

this my code:

#!/usr/bin/bash

ftp -i -n << "END"
open www.publicserver.com
user anonymous 123
bin
cd public
mget $(cat /export/home/noc/vsftpd-2.0.4/bin/files1.txt)
bye
END
echo "ftp complete"

When I try to run it, I get this error: "$(cat: No such file or directory.
/export/home/noc/vsftpd-2.0.4/bin/files1.lst): No such file or directory.
can't find list of remote files, oops
ftp complete"

I agree that bash can translate variables with $ but on my script, ftp was invoked on bash and the way I see it, ftp is the one evaluating the variables enclosed on the << END portion of the program.

OK I get it.
It's because you put quotes around END. Try without the quotes, like this: ftp -i -n <<END

Yves.