Many thanks to those who responded. I have listed their names at the end.
Here was the Scenario:
An older Sparc II used as a data acquisition system. (The only Unix system I have.) If I let it run
unattended, the disk fills up with data. Currently using ftp and manually moving data on a daily basis, to a
WinNT system with monster disks on it. Then I can analyze at leisure. Is there some way to automate this
process using ftp. A new file is created every day, with the only difference in file names being the number
of the day. Any help would be appreciated, and I'll try to summarize.
Solutions:
Many suggested trying 'expect' (http://expect.nist.gov/). I checked out the site, and while it looks like expect
would do what I want, and much more, I should say that I am not much of a unix user. I was able to get this
one system up and running, pretty much out of the box, with the data acquisition software from UC
Berkeley. I really want to avoid perturbing the system unless absolutely necessary. (You know the maxim:
If it aint broke, don't fix it.) I decided against expect, but it looks very good. For the same reason I didn't
want to add drives or commercial software to the system.
Turns out the simplest solution was a couple of scripts, and the .netrc file. I wrote a script that uses the find
and cp commands to gather up all the daily files into one directory, Then I wrote the .netrc file in my home
directory that automates the ftp login. Also in there is the macro that moves the file. It looks like this:
machine machine_name login login_name password passwd
macdef aa
cd where_ever_you_want_it
put xyz
quit
At the prompt
ftp machine_name < some_file
contents of some_file
$aa
quit
Courtesy of Sanjay Srivastava.
Then I used the cron command to execute the scripts once a day.
Again - many thanks to these people for their kindness and help:
Troy Wollenslegel
Tim Evans
Michael Hill
Daniel Ellis
Raymond Bero
Urban Nilsson
Mark Inaba
Rich Snyder
Bismark Espinoza
Sanjay Srivastava
Alan Thew
Cliff Trapp
Tony Benge
Shriman Gurung
Bill Walker
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