Shell Programming and Scripting

I am a new member of this forum and am also new to unix shell scripting.
I joined the forum to seek for help to achieve my task as this forum helps people.
here's what i do manually on daily basis
1)Loginto different unix box
2)Ftp the log files (morethan 50 each dir) to windows
3)use text pad and do find in files "Exception"
4)I get the file name , the exception entry
These tasks take much some since i need to pull the log files from 10 different server and by the time i find the exception , it 's almost the day is over.
Need your help in automating this process
So what i need a shell script to
1)from dev unix box, copy the logs files from 10 different servers
2)Use shell script/awk command to look thro' each directory
and find for particular string that i mention in the script.
It's kind of rule based name of the log file. date of the log , etc pass as a parameter.
Don't ask me what i have done. because i am new to unix scripting.
Help me so i can refer the forum to many people.

Code:

cat << EOF |
server1 directory local_directory file_meta_chars*
server2 /somewhere /somewhereelse log_blue*
server3 /here /there log_green*
EOF
while read hostname directory local_directory file_meta ; do

ftp -nvd << EOF
open $hostname
user sharugan my-password
cd $directory
lcd $local_directory
prompt
mget $file_meta
bye
EOF

cd $local_directory
grep Exception $file_meta

done |
  tee /somepath/my-complete-log

.. . or something like that should do the trick.

thank you so much for the script.I am going to try it out.
As i said i am new to shell script and don't know anything about shell script.
But your comments say "or something like that should do the trick"
wondering if this is not the exact script or i need to modify these.
if so , can you give me the exact script that does all the task for me as i mentioned above.

as i am learing from you , can you add comments on the each block to understand what it does. for ex: I don't know what this block does.
cat << EOF |
server1 directory local_directory file_meta_chars*
server2 /somewhere /somewhereelse log_blue*
server3 /here /there log_green*
EOF