is from 3/2004, and the Netrc and FTP man pages certainly don't mention that the use of ~/.netrc is deprecated. I don't believe it's use is deprecated.
The file permissions for ~/.netrc are 0400 as specified in the documentation.
Since the script hangs at the point it is accessing the netrc file I can do no further error checking. Also, since the script previously ran fine without the use of
is not setup correctly.