Shell Programming and Scripting

I want a script that would monitor a certain directory and ftp the file which matches the requirement (name) with a certain timeframe. But my sample script will repeating ftp those files which have already sent. How to avoid this? Thanks!

I can think of two ways,

1) Rename those files on remote server which you have already picked
2) use 'newer' option while doing ftp

look into man ftp for more info on above two options

hi,
Append time stamp with date-time for each file during ftping.
Some thing like say

CREDITINFO="FILE_TO_BE_FTPED"
DATESTAMP=`TZ=CST+24 date +%Y%m%d`

mv ${CREDITINFO} ${CREDITINFO}_${DATESTAMP}

now put ${CREDITINFO}_${DATESTAMP}

hi

let me explain my problem further,

for a certain directory dir_a, I have 4 files: account_summary_a, account_info_b, credit_detail_c, discount_account_d. Each of these files came from some other places but they are 'promised' to be places at this directory by certain everyday. Now each day I need to ftp these 4 files to another server for processing, so what I need to do is to monitor dir_a to check if these 4 files exist and if they do ftp it else sleep for a while then come back and check again.

My problem is say I have already ftp both account_summary_a and credit_detail_c but can't find the other two, so I would sleep, right? when I come back I will check the existence for all files which would find that both account_summary_a and credit_detail_c exist and so the script will ftp these 2 files again. I want to avoid this. Thanks