Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a question. My company has to send a file to another company. The cron script currently just sends the file. However, every now and then the other companies ftp server is down. I wanted to alter my script to detect if the server is up before I attempt to send the file. My idea follows

# Check to see if xxx ftp application is working
ftpResponse=`ftp -n -v XXX.XXX.XXX.XX < $GERS_HOME/adhoc/arcr/FTPCHK.ftp`

#echo "$ftpResponse"

ftpnum=`echo "$ftpResponse"|grep 230 | wc -c`

#echo $ftpnum

if [ $ftpnum -gt 0 ] ; then
.....
fi


The ftp sites IP number does not contain the number 230 . The current response from the server is below. Do you think that this would be a robust method or do you have a more robust method?

Connected to XXX.XXX.XXX.X.
220 xxx_FTP1
331 Password required for XXXXXXX.
230 User XXXXXXX logged in.
221 Bye bye ...

Meaning of the returned FTP codes.
220 Service ready for new user.
331 User name okay, need password.
230 User logged in, proceed.
221 Service closing control connection. Logged out if appropriate.

I think your method is robust enough.

alternatively, just use

ping yourserver -c 1 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
echo "server up"
else
echo "server down"
fi

This will show if 'yourserver' is running.

I should have mentioned that I wanted to make sure the FTP service is up, not just the server. My bad...

I will go with my method.