Internet - File Transfer Protocol

Clients

William Kitchen says:

The command line ftp utility that comes with WIN95 and above is scriptable. You invoke it from the command line like this:

ftp -s:myscript.txt

The script file is just a list of what you would normally have typed manually. Here's an example of how someone might synchronize Netscape bookmarks between work and home.

open myofficemachine.somedomain.com
myusername
mypassword
cd c:\progra~1\netscape\users\me
lcd "c:\progra~1\netscape\users\me
get bookmark.htm
bye

If you want to make the process even easier, you can create a batch file something like the following and call it something like "getbookmarks.bat". This batch passes itself to the ftp program as an argument (the first line is the clever part, notice the %0), so that everything is self contained. The batch interpreter skips the ftp script, and the ftp program generates a couple of harmless error messages, but otherwise safely ignores the lines that aren't part of the ftp script. The batch looks something like this:

ftp -s:%0.bat
goto done
open myofficemachine.somedomain.com
myusername
mypassword
cd c:\progra~1\netscape\users\me
lcd "c:\progra~1\netscape\users\me
get bookmark.htm
bye
:done