The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Exchanging Files VIA FTP

Is there a program which allows you
to schedule the uplod and download of files recurrently

ie: every days, every 5 minutes, every 5 month

It's basically for exchanging flat files with different databases around the world

Photonix
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

I know of one company that has an "auto ftp" program the periodically wakes up, gets a directory listing, sees what files match and then FTPs files that match to appropriate locations.

It is due to be open sourced in October 2004. Seriously!

Matt H.
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Couldn't you use most any command line FTP tool with Task Scheduler/cron ??

sgf
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Script the FTP commands and add to Task Scheduler?

Indian Developer in India
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Ah ... cron, Perl's Net::FTP works fine for me. You can also use Net::SFTP http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/CPAN/data/Net-SFTP/Net/SFTP.html

The options are endless really but then I develop on linux.

Me
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

There is at least one commercial product for this. I looked into using it a while ago. Check google.

pdq
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

In addition to FTP, you might want to look at rsync and unison, two open-source solutions to keep hosts in sync.

FredF
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

It's times like this when I always step back and say:

What exactly is it you're trying to do? If you told us the problem you were trying to solve, we may think of a better way to do it.

www.MarkTAW.com
Tuesday, February 10, 2004

There are cron like programs for the windows platform, couple it with a flexible scripting language (with the appropriate FTP module support) and you should be laughing. A shareware especially designed to do this can be found, but eventually you'll discover you have out grown it* (unless the said tool is scripting friendly).

What some earlier posters said about cron and Perl/Python/vbscript plus FTP modules is something to look into.

>>> * Before you send a file, is it valid? Scripting languages are best suited for quick and dirty big picture validations, here are some examples (there's no way a shareware supports EVERY situation you can come up with):

* did zip work?

* are there any files in directory?

* is decription correct

* is it zero size?

* did it pass md5

* did notification emali bounce?

* is this the old file that failed last week's transfer?

* did transfer failed? notify by cell number

Li-fan Chen
Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Yep and it is free....

http://www.prosoftcentral.com/

Also lookup blat which allows you to send command line emails which are trivial to schedule using the Windows scheduler

Code Monkey
Wednesday, February 11, 2004