Home / server / Questions / 154640
Accepted
benPearce
Asked: 2010-06-25 14:30:23 +0800 CST

FTP Script to download a set of files

  • 772

I am after an FTP script to download all the files from an FTP server, then delete these files once complete, but leave files on the remote server if any were added during the download process, to be fetched during a later session.

Is it possible to achieve something like this using FTP scripts or do I need a different solution.

I was planning on using psftp.

ftp scripting

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Based on Maxwell's answer to this question, I would probably do something along the lines of this pseudocode:

    Use $favorite_scripting_language to gather the list of filenames to d/l then kill; write an output file named script.txt in the form:

    cd /source/directory
lcd c:\target\directory
get foo.bar
delete foo.bar
<<lather, rinse, repeat>>

    then wrap it up with:

    psftp.exe username@server -be -pw user_password -b c:\script.txt
    • 2

  2. How about python? As a plus, it should work more or less unmodified on any OS. And the even bigger plus is that it is more flexible that using the other, more brittle, methods.

    It would go something like this:

    from ftplib import FTP
import os

ftp = FTP("server")
ftp.login("id", "passwd")
ftp.cwd("/server/ftpdir/")

#copy every file as usual to local system
filelist = []
ftp.retrlines('LIST', filelist.append)
### the list filelist will have one element per file
### which you will have to cut up into the proper pieces
### among Python's installed files on your system is 
### the script Tools/scripts/ftpmirror.py which has such code
### it starts at around line 140 (for python 2.6.1) 
### --- not very long but this margin is too small to contain it
### assume the file names are in dictionary filedict
### keys are filenames and values are file sizes
for fname in filedict.keys():
   localfname = os.path.join(localdir, fname) # set localdir to cwd or whatever
   lf = open(localfname , "wb")
   ftp.retrbinary('RETR ' + fname, lf.write)
   lf.close()
#refresh remote directory listing into filedict2 as with previous filedict
for fname in filedict2.keys():
   if fname not in filedict:
       # new file since download started! ignore. it's for later
       pass
   else:
       if filedict[fname] == filedict2[fname]:
          # apparently we got a good copy so delete the file on ftp server
          ftp.delete(fname)
       else:
          # delete local file: remote was being uploaded or something
          os.unlink(os.path.join(localdir, fname))

    You have to add error checking and other such stuff. The same could be accomplished with perl and it would probably look about the same.

    • 0