Shell Programming and Scripting

Good morning,

The script below without the hilited text successfully FTPs the files in question to the other server when it is called from the crontab. I don't want to establish an FTP connection when there are no files so I tried including the hilited lines to only establish an FTP connection if there is a file to ftp. When I included those three lines, the crontab doesn't do the FTP, it renames the file to append the timestamp, but does not FTP the file. If I run this script including the hilited lines manually, the FTP works when there is a file, and correctly is ignored when there isn't one.

Can anyone here make sense of this? How can I get it to work when called from the cron job?

Code:

echo `date` MoveJob Starts
for testfile in /SYSRES/SYSREX/XPOLLD*0001
do
  if [ -f $testfile ]
  then
        mv $testfile $testfile.ftp
  fi
done
if [ -f *.ftp ]
then
ftp -v -n -i <ip address> << cmd
user "user" "password"
cd /PollData/Uploads
lcd /SYSRES/SYSREX
mput *.ftp
quit
cmd
fi
for testfile in /SYSRES/SYSREX/XPOLLD*0001.ftp
do
  if [ -f $testfile ]
  then
        cp $testfile `dirname $testfile`/`basename $testfile .ftp`.`date '+%m%d%H%M%S'`
        rm $testfile
  fi
done
echo `date` MoveJob Ends

Note: this is on an AIX server.

Older version of ksh/bash shells dont support wildcard. ( I think bash above v 3 will do that).
if you really want to check then you can count the files and if OK, proceed further.

Code:

files=$(ls *.ftp 2> /dev/null | wc -l)
if [ "${files}" -eq "5" ]; then  ## for 5 files
 .....

The quick fix would be:
cd /SYSRES/SYSREX
if [ -f *.ftp ]

The "lcd" in the "ftp" commands is then not needed.

I tried your (anchal's) suggestion and got the same result. Fail to FTP when called from cron, succeed to FTP when run from shell. Succeed to rename file in both cases. methyl's suggestion looks good and cleans up my script as the script is already in that directory, but it still doesn't work - fails to FTP when called from cron, succeeds to FTP when run from shell. Could there be a permissions problem where cron can't ftp?

When in cron make no assumptions.
It's worth making a one-off cron which just contains a unix shell "set" command and studying the output.

Hi philplasma

If am reading correct

The following code will check for the file in the home path of the user where the cron is set.

Code:

if [ -f *.ftp ]

I think your *.ftp files were in other dir other than cron user home path.

Regards
GIC

GIC1986, Yes! That was exactly it. Thanks, I had to change the test condition to include the full path even though the script that cron was running was already in that path.

Thanks!