UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have an ftp user, which has been setup to run ftp jobs to a specific machine (different jobs). for the first job i created .netrc in the ftp users home directory and added the appropriate commands

machine FTPBOX01 login user1 password xxx
macdef init
etc
etc
get file
bye

I use the command 'ftp FTPBOX01' in my shell script to call the entry for that machine in my .netrc file

However, I need this user to be able to run different jobs but on the same machine , for example my .netrc file would look something like this:

machine FTPBOX01 login user1 password xxx
macdef init
etc
etc
get file
bye

machine FTPBOX01 login user2 password xxx
macdef init
etc
etc
get another file
bye


however, because i am using the 'ftp FTPBOX01' command it cant dtermine which job to run it just gets the first matching entry in .netrc (ie the top one)

How can specify from within my shell script which job i want to run, somebody has suggested that i create a different ftp user with its own .netrc file, but this is not an option as there will possibly be hundreds of jobs to the same machine

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated

Thanks and regards
Gary

See this post for my solution. And please get acquainted with our search function. You could have found this post yourself.

Perderabo

That sounds great, i presume with this method, that everything is self contained within the script and .netrc is totally bypassed. However i am slightly confused over the following lines

exec 4>&1
ftp -nv >&4 2>&4 |&

what exactly is going on here ?

Thanks
Gary

Scroll down a bit from that post I referenced...its all there.