detecting success or failure of ftp automatically

[Dermot Beirne]

Hi,
I have an ftp process running from a shell script. It is something like this:

{
for host in nemail
do
echo "
open $host
user joe joepass
lcd /archive/dbeirne/admin/testdir1/
ascii
mput p*
close
"
done
} | ftp -i -n

I want to be alerted if the ftp fails for any reason, ie. cannot connected to the host, the username or password is incorrect, etc. I have tried using the standard $? variable, but this shows success even if the ftp fails. Is there a simple way of checking for failures of this type of script, and running a command like sending a page or whatever.

I know that I can grep through it's logfile for errors, but this is cumbersome as it's logfile is being appended to and is quite large, and contains some historic errors.

Thanks in advance.
Dermot.

[Dermot Beirne]

Sorry, I did not mean to post this in the database section of the forum.

Apologies, please ignore it!

Regards,
Dermot