Date check of file on NT

[Jim Mulligan_1]

Can someone please tell me how I might do the following?
I need to check the date that a file was created on a NT server and compare it to currant date then ftp it to a UNIX server if it is currant.

Thanks,
Jim

[James R. Ferguson]

Jim:

Look at the man pages for 'ftp'. Instead of doing a "get", use "newer". This 'get' the file only if the modification time of the remote file is more recent that the file on the current system. If the file does not exist on the current system, then the remote file is considered newer.

...JRF...

[Jim Mulligan_1]

James,

The ?newer? option in ftp works fine when getting the file for the first time from the NT server however on the second try with a newer file (testfile.txt) in place I get an error message.
500 ?MDTM testfile.txt? : command not understood
Any other suggestions will be appreciated.

Jim

[Tim Malnati]

The easiest way to handle this is to mount the NT file system on the unix box using samba client or NFS and then use standard unix commands/scripts or whatever to copy stuff around.

Another alternative is use one of the ftp based public domain mirroring software packages (mirror, rsync, etc) to do it, but it requires that you setup the NT box as a FTP server which can be somewhat shakey situation from a security point of view.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Jim:

Well so much for NT ;-)

This works fine in UNIX but I regret that I can't make it work from NT either. I get the same error as you do.

...JRF...

[Jim Mulligan_1]

James,
Thanks for trying.

Tim,
I'll make the suggestion but since I'm a contractor I can't just do it.

Thanks,
Jim

[James H. Trice Ph.D.]

I had this same problem. The only way I could find to handle it was to issue a directory command, parse out the date and time and compare that to the reference date and time (using perl). One other problem I had was that the date and time on a directory did not change on NT when the contents of the directory were modified. I have not figured out what to do about that.
Jim Trice

[Jim Mulligan_1]

Dr. James,
Thank you for your comments but what we have decided to do is after doing a get from the NT server we are going to rename the file. So if the file is there tomorrow we do a get and rename again and so on. We thing this will server our purpose.

Thanks again,
Jim