XP command line FTP programme

[The PIT]

Does this keep a log of failed transactions????

[Rob(QG)]

No - all errors are printed on the screen.

If you are running it with a script file, then you could redirect the output to a file by adding
>> ftplog.txt
to the end of the ftp command.

[The PIT]

Now the next question is how do I ftp via the command line in a script???

[Rob(QG)]

ftp host -s:response.txt >> ftplog.log

where host is the ftp server to connect to.
response.txt is a text file containing all your ftp commands one on each line like this:

username
password
bin
cd /
prompt
mget 2004????.txt
mput 2003????.*
bye

if you are using mput or mget you need to use prompt or it will get stuck waiting for y/n answers.

[The PIT]

Dumb question time. Can you use wildcards with mput or do you have to specify each file one by one. Windoze help sort of hints that you can put all the files on one line but doesn't show the syntax.

[Rob(QG)]

You can use wildcards as I have shown in my example:
? replaces one character
* replaces 0 or more characters

I'm not sure, but I don't think you can do:
mput a.txt b.txt c.txt

instead you would do:
mput *.txt

or:
mput ?.txt

and as I mentioned you should have a prompt statement before any mput or mget (you only need one prompt statement - a second prompt statement will turn the questions back on)

mget and mput are also useful if you don't know the exact name of the file. I have scripts that move files around that start with a known bit of text then have the date they were created in the filename (fileYYYYMMDDhhmmss.txt) so I move them around with the wildcard file??????????????.txt

[The PIT]

Ah the batch files works just had to change the order to the following

ftp -slus.txt ftp.plus.net >> error.txt

and bingo.

Now I got to schedule the damn thing.

[The PIT]

Lets see what happens hopefully I'll get loads of errors.

[The PIT]

Help new problem when I schedule it it's failing to create an log.

Exit code is one whatever that means.

[Rob(QG)]

Originally posted by The PIT
Ah the batch files works just had to change the order to the following

ftp -slus.txt ftp.plus.net >> error.txt

Oops - forgot that ftp was picky about having the host after the switches.We've switched to using VB programs with the Mabry FTP/X control instead of command line ftp, so I'm a bit rusty,

[The PIT]

Problem is it isn't creating the error log.

[Rob(QG)]

It should give you a complete list of all the messages that would have appeared on the screen if you had typed the same stuff in interactively.

The exit code isn't useful as the last ftp command is bye or quit - which is gonna succeed.

Any errors that occur should be in the error.txt file, tho - you just have to check it manually.

Trapping errors is exactly why we don't use ftp command line anymore.


Oops - missed that this happened when scheduled. You may need to create a batchfile that runs the ftp command, and schedule that instead.

[The PIT]

Just remembered XP has it's paths mixed up so it doesn't know where the ftp programme is.

So I just added the path statement to the batch file that launches it.

I'll correct that error at another time.

[Rob(QG)]

In the scheduled task you can set the working directory.

[The PIT]

Yes but the ftp programme hides in the windows directory and windows doesn't know where it is. The batch file is in a directory called test.

It's a problem that does occur with some XP installs. So any dos command I run from command prompt results in unknown command.

This probably happened after my problems with a Norton Antivirus uninstall and re-install.