Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am relatively new to Unix. What I am trying to create now is a script to ftp some file(s) from Unix server to Windows ( not mine) machine. It should be able to run not in interactive mode, eventually I will schedule it to run at certain time intervals.

So far I have created the following script:

ftp windows_server_name
USER my_account_on_win_server
PASS my_password there
put dir_name/file_name
bye


However when I run it it behaves interactively, it asks me for user name and password on target machine anyway. My question is what should I change in this script to make it non-interactive ? My shell is ksh.

Thanks

Use a file in your home directory called ".netrc", put all user names/passwords in this file and ftp will look it up rather than ask you.

Unfortunately there is no such file in my home directory.
I tried "more .netrc" in both /home/ and /home/myaccount/ but in either case it gave a message ".netrc: No such file or directory"

Are you not able to create one?

Yes I can create it. It looks like this:

user my_win_login
pass my_win_password

The script now looks like this:

ftp win_server
put file_name
bye

I run it as:

sh my_script

but it still asks for login name and password

Hi.

It worked for me -- Debian Linux to SuSE Linux.

There were two requirements:

1) a line with "machine name"

2) read permissions only for owner

After meeting those, the operation seemed to work. Here is a little script that creates a file and transfers it. I turned on verbose mode to display the operations:

Code:

#!/bin/sh -

# @(#) s1       Demonstrate auto-login for ftp.

( date; echo " Hello, world." ) > t1

ftp -v limb <<'EOF'
put t1
quit
EOF

exit 0

Producing:

Code:

% ./s1
Connected to limb.
220 limb.local FTP server (Version 6.5/OpenBSD, linux port 0.3.3) ready.
331 Password required for drl.
230- Have a lot of fun...
230 User drl logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
local: t1 remote: t1
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 't1'.
226 Transfer complete.
44 bytes sent in 0.00 secs (1074.2 kB/s)
221 Goodbye.

The .netrc file looks like:

Code:

% cat ~/.netrc
machine limb
login drl
password (secret)

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

It's interesting. I'll try it tomorrow and let you know about results.