ftp

[Nancy Bahouth Spirakis]

I have a process that ftp's multiple large files from my local HP box to another. At times one of the files does not transfer fully and I get "sendfile: Broken pipe" message in root mail. My question is: Is ftp smart enough to recognize this condition and resend that file? Right now, I manually check for this and resend the file. I'm looking for any information or suggestions on how to automate this.

Thanks in advance for all responses.

Nancy

[Ron Kinner]

Probably not. My FTP process just gives up if it has problems. After a successful FTP it moves the file to the Archive directory so I have a script which checks periodically to see if the To_Send folder has any files and if it finds one restarts the FTP send process. If it doesn't go this time it will usually go the next time.

Ron

[Patrick Wallek]

No, unfortunately FTP isn't that smart. What you could have a look at though is the NET::FTP module for Perl. I don't have any experience with this personally, but have heard about what it can do from A. Clay Stephenson. I'm sure he can tell you more about it.

[Krishna Prasad]

What I have done in the past is one of two things.

1. Use rcp when ever possible. This may not be possible for you.

2. When I must use ftp I script the ftp put then when the put command completes, I use ftp to create a file that list the files in the directory on the target server. I then break out of ftp and check for the file name that I sent in the ftp command. If the file isn't on the target system I either report an error or retry the ftp put.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Nancy:

Since that pesky Patrick gave me some homework to do, here is a Perl script that will do what you want.

It first logs you in to a remote server, change the remote host, user, and password to suit your needs. It then does a cwd to /tmp and puts ftp in 'binary mode'. It then reads the command line for filenames to send. It will try each one up to 5 times. The beauty of doing this in perl is that the error checking is built right in. You will need to download and install the Net::FTP module from http://www.perl.org/CPAN but after that you are done. I never bother trying to do this stuff in the shell anymore because this is so much easier.

P.S. If you need to punch through a proxy server, simply supply a 3rd argument to the login subroutine and it will be just like you typed the account ftp command yourself.

Regards, Clay