Hi,

Currently, i am using sftp manully to transfer files between two secure servers. Can anyone provide me a sample shell script which can automate the sftp process?

Hate to be short, but use the search button (upper right hand corner over there!). There are a tremendous amount of examples on this board.

I have finally added a post in the faq section on automated ftp.

Navigate

our home page -> Answers to Frequently Asked Questions -> Automate FTP / Scripting FTP Transfers

Perderabo

The information provided was awesome. Being a begginner in Unix, a lot of stuff was difficult for me to understnad. Just wanted to enquire whether the script can be used to include 'SFTP' instead of 'FTP'.

Thanks

Yeah, but you'll need to adjust the script so that it answers the questions sftp asks. Just run sftp by hand and make a note of what you do. Then adjust the script accordingly. Or have the script in a second window and adjust it as you run.

Perderabo,

I made few modifcations to your script to incorporate sftp instead of ftp. I am getting the following error

$ ./coolFtp.sh
$ Warning: tcsetattr failed in ssh_rl_set_tty_modes_for_fd: fd 1: I/O error

The script i am using is :

HOST=<Ip Address>
USER=<user>
PASSWD=<pswd>

exec 4>&1
sftp >&4 2>&4 |&

print -p open $HOST
print -p user $USER $PASSWD
print -p cd rksample
print -p binary
print -p lcd
print -p lcd rktest
print -p put rkftp.txt

exit

Am i doing anything wrong here?

sftp does not support "open" or "user" commands. At least mine does not. I tried the script that you posted. I get a usage statement. This means that my sftp is different than yours and I won't be able to spoonfeed you a answer.

My sftp is unwilling to accept a password via stdin. It seem to open /dev/tty and do a read. I have to arrange for ssh to work without a password. This involved running "ssh-keygen -t rsa". Then I had to copy my ~/.ssh/id_ra.pub file into my .shh/authorized_key2 file on the ftp server. Then on the client system, I ran ssh-agent and used ssh-add to add the new identity. At this point, both ssh and sftp to the ftp server worked without asking for a password.

At this point, this script worked:
But looking at the manpage for sftp I see that it also supports a batchfile option. That may be another approach worth persuing.