UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

I have to work on a korn shell script to pick up only the current day files dropped on the remote server (using ftp).
The file do not have daytimestamp on it. It has to be based on server time (AIX)

The file naming convention is "test_file.txt"

When I log in into the ftp account from browser I can see the day the file dropped.

However when I log in from the server using ftp commands manually, I can't find the day the file arrived.

Can somoene please help me with the script.

Thanks & Regards
pavan

After issuing a suitable ftp cd command. Please post a small sample from the ftp command dir command. Preferably include a sample where the date is a single digit day.
This should show posters the format on your system.

Code:

ftp -inv $ftp_host
$user
$password
cd $ftp_dir
ls test_file.txt
ls_test_file.txt
get test_file.txt
bye

however I don't know from above when the file was dropped on the server. I have to pick up only if the file was dropped today.

Thanks
Pavan

Please reply to my post #2.

You cannot do the entire process with only FTP.
This is going to end up as a multi-stage process:
1) FTP: Get a directory listing from the remote directory
2) Shell: Process the directory listing to find today's files
3) FTP: Get only the file(s) identified above


Btw. The conventional design of this sort of process is to rename the files after successful transfer so it is easy to identify new files.

This is a new process I am trying to put in place. since we pick up files from external remote server, I don't have rename privileges (or the user ID that I am using.) They give us read only previleges.

can you please tell me how do I achieve this,

FTP: Get a directory listing from the remote directory

Thanks
Pavan

1) log in with ftp
2) ls

I ran the following FTP commands manually (on AIX server )

Code:

ftp -inv $ftp_host
$user
$password
cd $ftp_dir
ls test_file.txt
ls_test_file.txt
get test_file.txt
bye

when i do ls <filename>

it just list the file but it will not give me complete listing such as

Code:

-rwxr-xr-x    1 <user>   <usr>            4746 Apr 11 12:13 test_file.txt

how do I get this complete listing,

Thanks
Pavan