I am pretty new at shell scripting, but I managed to make a primative shell script to connect from my webserver (bluehost) to an external data server via ftp or sftp or whatever I need. This script is :
This script worked on my machine, but when I uploaded it to try it on bluehost, it did not work. I guess ftp and sftp from the webserver is not allowed (maybe I should have already known this). I am allowed ssh access to bluehost, however. I was wondering if there was any other way to get data from an ftp server, and then put that data to my webserver? Should I be trying a different shell script, or take it an move to something like php or perl? Thank you for any information, I searched the forums and I'm pretty sure there is not an answer to this already.

Does the PATH on the web server include the ftp program?

I'm not 100% sure what you are asking. I put the script into the same directory as the path I'm specifying in lcd. I know it's repetitive, but I wanted to make sure it would d/l to that path. My main problem is that ftp from my web server is disabled, which means that I have to download the data from the external data ftp server, and then upload the data to from my computer to the bluehost webserver. I need a way around this, if there is one. I need to directly get data from the external data server to the webserver, skipping me as the intermediate step.

PS: I do have a public_ftp folder, which I can setup for anonymous ftp, but I don't think this will have anything to do with any solution for my problem.

Am I correct in assuming that you want to initiate ftp on the bluehost web server to collect data from the external ftp server.
Then is the ftp program on the bluehost machine in the path that is available to you?

Yes. I have access to the location where I have the ftp script on the bluehost server, however, I do not think that I am allowed to initate ftp from the bluehost server due to security reasons. I am trying to find an alternative method for getting data automatically to my bluehost server.

I don't do web programming, but, can you supply the data from the external ftp server to the bluehost web page as input data? If there are binary files, use uuencode and uudecode .