Shell Programming and Scripting

thats the weird thing, it is failing on a put. But not on any local command (preceeded by !)

I think that's expected behaviour - the built-ins abort, but shell can do whatever.

Your issue then is just that you don't know what (local) unlinks failed? Couldn't you create a list of the files transferred and just check which ones still exist?

Yes that was also my thought :-)
but my boss shot the idea for following reason.
how will you know when the echo file > smth has worked or not :s
answer is, you won't

he's kind of a nitpicker :-)

Do you need to?

You already know which files you're attempting to transfer (ls -tr $tbtsftp > listoffiles.txt). Can you check which files actually transferred via increasing sftp's log level and saving the output somewhere? (I'm not sure how much it actually outputs in batch mode)

Yes i know that, and i know i could be able to write a list directly after the transfer as follows

Code:

sftp> put $file
sftp> echo $file >> somecheckfile

but my boss won't allow me to do it like that since your suggestion is 2 much manual work when you have a list of 10000+ files
and my example is not 100% failsave (this is farfetched but if the echo ... fails in my example, you are going to send this file again next run (since it wont be in the list for files 2 be deleted)

for today i am quitting, time to get home.
i'll be back here tomorrow.
Any suggestions are welcome

I think you missed my point. I was suggesting something like:

Code:

ls -tr $tbtsftp > listoffiles.txt

for FILE in `cat listoffiles.txt`; do
    echo "cd "$remotepath_VAN >> $commandlist
    echo "put "$FILE >> $commandlist
done

echo
echo "Executing commandlist over sftp"
echo    
sftp -vvv $sftplogon@$sftpserver -b $commandlist 2>&1 > somelogfile.txt

And then compare listoffiles.txt (or $commandlist, for that matter) to somelogfile.txt using an awk script or whatever. No "!echo"s in the batchfile, or manually - somelogfile.txt is just SFTP's own "Uploading /tmp/x.sh to /tmp/nosuchdir/y.sh", "Couldn't get handle: No such file or directory", etc.

BUT - I'm not sure exactly what SFTP itself logs in batchmode, and I don't have any keyed machines to check with atm. So it might not be feasible.

scp should also be available, if that helps.