Shell Script FTPing Problems

[CrusaderAD]

I have a shell script that does this via ftp:


mget *.txt
mdelete *.txt

I'm downloading batches of invoices all at once. Problem is that FTP is unreliable and sometimes just halts after a few downloads... stopping the script when this happens will delete everything up there and only get a few invoices. Any ideas? Is there an auto-retry option or something?

[Lars Noodén]

ncftpget (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/en/man1/ncftpget.1.html) has the ability to resume interrupted transfers. See the -z option. I'm not sure how good the error checking is but it is a step in the right direction.

[CrusaderAD]

Looked super promising. I just tried it. It died after 12 transfers:


Could not read reply from control connection -- timed out.
ncftpget /Invoices/*.pdf: timed out while waiting for server response.

I used -z in the command, but it just died. Any ideas?

[Lars Noodén]

Are you using passive mode? You could try forcing it with -F

I have to admit I use FTP very little now and have become rusty. I normally do small transfers with SFTP and large ones with rsync.

[CrusaderAD]

I did it with -zDD in the command, so now I can download and delete after a successful transfer. Even if the connection dies, I won't be downloading duplicate files which is what I was afraid of. I can run this as much as I want which is cool. I think this is working out pretty well... THANK YOU!