I will think about the suggestions.

It appears the ideas are related to 'when I control ftp'. However, I often need to pick up data from a site I do not control, but are given the username & password to authenticate. Therefore, when automating, the password must come from somewhere to be sent.

I was thinking of:
(a) Creating a script to store username & passwords to a 'text' file, but in a jumbled sort of way. For instance, username=joe & pasword=hi; so since joe is the 10th, 15th and 5th letters of alphabet, I could add the numbers 10+15+5=30. I would then write my file as
"joekdjfiekcnt9230gh7a6cfbn8snh86i"
start with username "joe", then skip to the 30th position to get the first character of password "h", skip two and read the "i", and be at end of line.
{There are lots of algorithms I could choose.}
(b) Then, my ftp scripts could call the related program to retrieve the info from the stored text file.
(c) Perhaps I could make my 'retrieval password' script protected so that it can only be executed by users, but not able to be read?

I could then logon to someone else's ftp site without embedding the username and password in the ftp script. Further, even if someone stumbled upon or knew of the text username-password file, they wouldn't necessarily know the logic to pull apart the text to learn the valid passwords.

Not perfect, but maybe an approach to reading a separate file for username/password pairs so that they are not embedded in the user scripts. Something a programmer could hack, but the general user, even if he/she printed out the script being run, would not see the username and password for the actions.


So... this is the direction of my thinking and what I am also searching for insight on from others.

Thanks.