Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I need to check whether one file has EOF or not.

There's one daemon in our system, which will pick the files FTPed to us. However, sometimes the daemon picks the file before FTP is finished.
So I'm planning to add some checking of EOF on the FTPed files in the shell script.

Could anyone please kindly help me on this? My boss is chasing me on that...

Thanks
Will

Unix does not have an EOF char, such as DOS has or had. Some implementations of FTP change the permissions on the destination file when completed. Some use the name <filename>.filepart as the end of the file and then change to to what the filename actually is upon completion.

Couple of ways to check for completion -

Have your daemon wait 60 seconds (sleep) and see if the file changes size during that time.

The best way to handle is to have the transmitter send a separate file (ie filename.end) upon completion - and wait for that.

So many choices....

If you have the utility lsof, then it may be helpful.

You can either lsof filename or lsof -p <pid> where pid is the process id of the ftp process.

See man lsof for more details.

Awk, thank you for your reply.

The issue is we cannot change anything from transmitter side. It sends more than 150k files everyday, and the files received by my server is just around 1%. We can't change the script on transmitter, as it will have big impact...

Our daemon does have 10 sec sleep after it's successful running. But checking size of each file twice will also cost a lot...

Is there any idea that can be suiltable for my scenario..

Thanks

Thank you for your suggestion. It's a good idea indeed. However, there's no lsof on our server and I'm not authorized to install it

Thanks

Any other good idea, please..

to summarize -

You cannot change the transmittal side to send anything special

You don't have lsof and no plans to get it.

You think it "costs too much" [in what, processor time???] to check the filesize to see it is not changing. [Guess what a human operator will cost to check it]

The filename doesn't change to indicate completion.

Can't think of anything else

Assuming there is nothing special about the end of the file (sometimes the last record contains all 9's - that you could check for), you are out of luck.

Suggest the human intervention solution - sometimes that works wonders on what they won't do.