Hi,
I m new to unix and I need a help in FTp-ing a file.

My script is given below

ftp -n <<END_SCRIPT
open $FTP_HOST
user $FTP_USER $FTP_PASSWD
lcd $TEMPFOLDER
cd $FTP_LOCATION
put $1
bye
END_SCRIPT
exit_status=$?
if [ "$exit_status" -eq "0" ] ; then
log "successfully FTPed the file"
else
log "Failed to FTP the report file"
fi


But the exit _status check doesnt seem to be working. I mean if the FTP_HOST name is given invalid, the exit_status still shows zero.

Can anyone pls tell me how else can I check for the successfult FTP of the file..

If your ftp client doesn't set its exit status properly, try switch to a different one. ncftp and lftp are fairly popular, and at least the latter has some scripting support of its own.

This might work, try out this way,

ftp -n $FTP_HOST <<END_SCRIPT
user $FTP_USER $FTP_PASSWD
lcd $TEMPFOLDER
cd $FTP_LOCATION
put $1
bye
END_SCRIPT
exit_status=$?
if [ "$exit_status" -eq "0" ] ; then
log "successfully FTPed the file"
else
log "Failed to FTP the report file"
fi

Thanks. But that option is not working for me. It just displays the error message in console as "unknown host or invalid literal address".
But the exit_status still shows as zero

No exit status error codes are defined for ftp by any standard that I am aware of. Therefore you cannot safely use $? to check exit status for errors unless your specific version of ftp supports such exit status error codes.

You need to use expect or a similar TCL to script the ftp session if you want to be able to detect session errors.

First off ftp is a protocol that is defined by RFC 959. This defines status reply codes, those numbers you see like 204. These are what you look for to determine what happened. Just checking the return code will not help anything in almost every case.