Sorry I'm new to this sort of thing. I'm trying to write a bash script that uploads a file to a server. How can I achieve this? Is a bash script the right thing to use for this?
I ended up using scp to copy the files securely.
scp <file to upload> <username>@<hostname>:<destination path>
I also set up public key authentication so I didn't have to enter my password every time I ran my script.
Install ncftpput and ncftpget. They're usually part of the same package.
#/bin/bash
# $1 is the file name
# usage: this_script <filename>
IP_address="xx.xxx.xx.xx"
username="username"
domain=my.ftp.domain
password=password
echo "
verbose
open $IP_address
USER $username $password
put $1
bye
" | ftp -n > ftp_$$.log
You can use a heredoc to do this e.g.
ftp -n $Server <<End-Of-Session
# -n option disables auto-logon
user anonymous "$Password"
binary
cd $Directory
put "$Filename.lsm"
put "$Filename.tar.gz"
bye
End-Of-Session
so the ftp process is fed on stdin with everything up to End-Of-Session. A useful tip for spawning any process, not just ftp! Note that this saves spawning a separate process (echo, cat etc.). Not a major resource saving, but worth bearing in mind.
You really should use SSH/SCP for this rather than FTP. SSH/SCP have the benefits of being more secure and working with public/preivate keys which allows it to run without a username or password.
For more details on setting up keys and moving files to the server with RSYNC, which is useful if you have a lot of files to move, or if you sometimes get just one new file among a set of random files, take a look at:
http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html
You can execute a single command after sshing into a server:
http://bashcurescancer.com/run%5Fremote%5Fcommands%5Fwith%5Fssh.html