Question

I need to allow new users do a daily ftp mget of many files with the same filename format, “*.zip”. On the ftp site the download directory is /data/autouploaded.

While there are lots of ways to do this, I wanted to try doing it a shell script with the multi-fetching capabilities of the mac/linux ftp command or the curl command.

I can almost get the ftp command to work:

ftp ftp://user:[e-mail]/%2fdata/autoupload

but this says “No such file ‘autouploaded” So add the trailing slash:

ftp ftp://user:[e-mail]/%2fdata/autoupload/

That just opens an interactive shell at the ftp site.

Well, how about adding the filenames as a glob at the end of the url? Nope. that tries to do an upload (put).

So, method 1. HOw do I say mget with the ftp command?

Alternately, I could use curl. Only, I can’t find a word about mget with curl. The filenames are NOT sequential so the range feature in curl makes no sense.

Suggestions? Help?

Thanks.

Answer 1

A quick Google search gave me this link: Scripting FTP access

The quick summation is to use << to inject commands to the FTP client.