Re: FTP commands - Closure - Long

Subject: Re: FTP commands - Closure - Long
From: John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 07:18:50 -0700 (PDT)

Hi, guys..I received a number of suggestions for this request...
thanks.

To close this topic (for now)...I gave the information to my
developer and he's seeing what he can do. When (or if) we come up
with a solution, I'll post it to the list.

However, in the mean time, in case you're interested in why I made
this request...

I'm managing the content of an intranet one of the things we do is
purchase collections of reports from vendors such as Yankee Group,
Cahners, etc.

Prior to me coming on, they were receiving CDs once a month and
manually transferring from the CD to subdirectories on the server. It
was talking about 27 person/hours per month to upload, then index the
reports and create HTML indexes of the reports. Most of these reports
are delivered in HTML and PDF form.

I came on and said bulls***...Did a little digging and found out that
these vendors have FTP sites where you can log on and download the
purchased reports along with pre-created HTML front-ends. Some
vendors produce less than 10 reports per quarter and some are
hundreds per month, released every day.

We're trying to set up scripts that will, on a scheduled basis,
"dial-up" the site, log in, go to the authorized directory, then
download the contents. The schedules vary..once a month, weekly, or
every night.

The files are then be placed in appropriate directories and if
necessary, unzipped. All of this is done with scheduled batch files.

Some collections are a single zip file and when unzipped, create
their own subdirectories. This is good. Others (and the reason for
the request), are on the vendor's FTP site as directories and
subdirectories. This is bad. Not knowing file/directory names and how
many sub-dir are in a collection make it necessary to use wild cards
or switches.

So far, I converted three vendors to this automated process and have
eliminated about 20 of the 27 hours per month, and made the material
available daily instead of about 40 day lag.

So...we're working on it (it may turn out that we need to enlist a
high-calibre programmer)...I'll let you know how it turns out, and
thanks for all the input.

=====
John Posada, Senior Technical Writer
"How to be happy in life: Never impose your beliefs
on anyone else and never fry bacon in the nude."
-- Anon
mailto:john -at- tdandw -dot- com, 732-259-2874

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