UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

There are 3 directories on FTP server with format yyyymmddhhmiss.

Can someone please let tell me how do I sort these directories in descending order.

I only have get the files from the latest directory on FTP server.

Code:

ftp>ls -l
20150707011229
20150707061229
20150707131225

ftp> cd 20150707061229
test.zip

Thanks
pavan

Seems like maybe you can't in FTP. You might have to retrieve the whole directory and then sort it within your shell script.

Did the ftp command ls -l really just give you a list of files (without, type, mode, owner, group, size, and date information)?

Did you really get test.zip in response to the ftp command cd 20150707061229?

What difference does the order of the list produced by the ftp command ls make to the way your script functions? The ftp command doesn't include any conditionals such that you could extract the first (or last) file produced by ls within ftp and do anything in ftp with those results.

If you are using ftp to get a list of files (in increasing alphanumeric order) and processing the list in the script that called ftp and you want to get the last item in the list instead of the first; can't you just use tail instead of head.