Question

I’m having a lot of trouble with a script i’m writing that will upload a file to a remote ftp server.

We have software that generates files in this format:

filename-`date +"%Y%m%d"`

My problem is that I can’t get ftp to expand that date expression, I’d like to be able to do a simple:

put filename1-`date +"%Y%m%d"` 

from .netrc or from stdin like:

ftp -n ftp.server.com < ftpcommands.txt

I’ve tried these but ftp takes the date expression literally and I get a
“filename1-`date….file not found”

Does anyone know a way in which I could get this resolved?

Also, does anyone know if you can specify the ftp sub-commands on the command line?
I’m having trouble finding examples on it. If that’s possible then bash would expand the date expression and pass it to ftp but I haven’t found any options that fit the bill.

I’m using the bash shell

Thanks!

Answer 1

The ftp program doesn’t perform shell expansions. One thing you could do is:

ftp -n ftp.server.com << EOF
# insert other commands here
put filename1-$(date +"%Y%m%d")
EOF

The here-document will be expanded by Bash to do what you want.