Hello,

Some thoughts and ramblings about your FTP functions...

You might have trouble with filenames containing spaces.  Not only the file being transfered but also things like your "elog" file.  Additional quoting would help in some cases 'cat "${7}"' instead of 'cat ${7}', for example, but I'm not sure what to do inside the "here documents" with the ftp commands.

Stylistically, I usually omit the braces around the numbered variables ($1 instead of ${1}, for example) but use them for alphanumeric variable names.  Either way works, just a matter of taste.

Stylistically, I'm not sure I'd have the functions exit the script on error.  But I can see where it'd be convenient, so maybe I'd provide a global variable to control that behavior, ftp_exit_on_error or something.

Grep should return a non-zero exit code if it matches anything, so your ftp status checks could probably be rewritten like this:

if grep 550 ${7}; then
    return 1
fi

But grep will also output the matching lines by default which you don't want in this case.  Some greps have a -q option or something to tell them to be quiet.  Otherwise you can use:

if grep 550 ${7} > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then
    return 1
fi

You could make that even shorter using the && operator instead of the if statement:

grep 550 ${7} > /dev/null 2>&1 && return 1

That'll make the script a bit shorter but also a bit harder to read.

Finally, as an entirely different way to do it, kermit can also be used to automate FTP transactions.  See the following for more information:

    The Kermit FTP Client - Secure Scriptable FTP
    http://www.kermitproject.org/ftpclient.html

    FTP Script Writing - How Do I Automate an FTP Session?
    http://www.kermitproject.org/ftpscripts.html


-- 
Edward Berner
Information Technology Operations
Yosemite Community College District

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