As others have suggested, it is worth spending a moment checking whether you already have Net::FTP. You don't mention what OS you're on but if it's Windows and you've got ActiveState Perl installed, then Net::FTP comes as standard, so you're covered.

Having said that, it is possible to "script" the standard 'ftp' program on both Windows and Unix (thereby not worrying about sockets or RFCs). The Windows binary (ftp.exe) takes a -s command line option which specifies a file containing FTP commands. In Unix you can pipe commands in from stdin:

ftp -inv <<EOF
open myhost
user myuser mypassword
cd somedir
get afile
quit
EOF
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That's actually a shell script solution but you could do something very similar in perl.

Hope that helps - apologies if I've missed the point.

I forgot to point out that by using this method (passing a list of commands to the OS's standard FTP program) you make error-handling a whole lot more difficult. With Net::FTP you can check for errors programatically after each step, and abort as soon as something fails. With this method you end up running all the commands, even if the very first (or even the login) fails, which generates a huge pile of spurious errors. Then you need to capture the output from the ftp program (into a file, or pipe it in) then parse it for strings that look like errors - usually but not always a three-digit code at the start of a line... SFTP is even worse...

I think I've successfully argued against my own solution - so make best efforts to find/install Net::FTP before resorting to this way!

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s^^unp(;75N=&9I<V@`ack(u,^;s|\(.+\`|"$`$'\"$&\"\)"|ee;/m.+h/&&print$&

Hie hubb0r, does all this modules comes with perl by default? (sorry, i am totally new to perl, i am a ASP guy trying to learn perl). i am working on a huge production server which i can't just simply install a new module. thats why i need to have some raw scripts.. Thanks for sharing with me... Cheers, Darren

Florist In Malaysia

Have you checked to see if Net::FTP is available? Maybe you don't even have to worry about all this stuff. If you can read the documentation, you have the module.

perldoc Net:::FTP
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Failing that, make friends with an admin. :)

--
brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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If you can install a new script, you should be able to install most modules too.

Anyway, Net::FTP is not part of the perl core distribution, but its libnet package is so useful that it's practically always available on machines with a perl install anyway. At the very least, it should be available as a system package (rpm, deb, ppm, whatever) for any system you'd want to run a production server on.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

Keep in mind that modules don't have to be installed system-wide; you can install a private copy of Net::FTP in a private directory, and put use lib '/path/to/private/dir'; at the top of your script to use it.

This should give you the basic idea of Net::FTP.

sub ftp_order_file {
    my $order_file = shift;
    my $ftp = new Net::FTP("hostname") || die "fail";
    $ftp->login("userid", "password");
    $ftp->cwd("/aa/a00/rel2.4/env/AATS1/GlomOrders");
    $ftp->get($order_file);
    $ftp->close();
}
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Put is not much different, just read the document.

/usr/bin/curl -T yourfile ftp://your.destination -u name:password
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