[thejeremy]

Hey forum,

I have some important files in varying directories on my PC here that I backup every so often on my Linux server. It gets kind of tedious to login to the ftp server, traverse to the directory, transfer the specific files, traverse to another directory, transfer more files, etc...for however many files I need to store (I know, I'm lazy ). I was wondering if/how I can write some kind of shell script that, when ran, will automagically login to the server and transfer all of the specified files to the server, even if they're located in different directories. That way I can backup everything with one command as opposed to a whole bunch.


Does anyone know how to do this and how difficult it is?

Thanks in advance.

[Greg]

I have no idea about it on Windows, but it probably wouldn't be to hard under Linux if the files that you need backed up are shared.

If you need to do it from Windows, you could look for a tutorial or something
(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search)

[hillbillybob]

Assuming your Linux box is the server you are wanting to back the files up to, and your on a windows box.

you will create two files. The first .bat file contains the CMD commands that bring up the ftp program native to windows (assuming you aren't using any security such as SSH or SSH2 with key swapping and the such.

The first .bat file may go something like this:
@echo off
ftp -s:ftpcommandfile.bat name.of.server

Before the ftp command you can put some move commands for the files. say, move them to a new directory or what not. After the FTP command you can do some disk cleanup, delete them, move them to an on disk archive directory, whatever. Please note that when execution hits the ftp command above, it will branch off to the second .bat file, the one containing the actual ftp commands you would normall use to log in (username, password - if applicable) and then the put/get commands

The second .bat file may look something like this. Be mindful of the new line (return) charecters

@echo off
username
password

put directory \file
*or*
mput directory \files

put will just put one file, while mput will put multiple files on the server. Very useful. You can use wildcard charecters (*) in any combination
text.* *tex*.txt *ext.* *.*

[thejeremy]

Awesome, not hard at all. Thanks

[bla!!]

Or if you want even simpler, set up samba on your linux box and share the directory you want the files copied to. Then mount the share on your windows box.

The batch file would be as simple as

@echo off
move windows\path\filename linux\path\filename

[hillbillybob]

Good point. I didn't think of that.

[thejeremy]

Too bad I didn't try that before I wrote the script


Now I need to write one to backup some stuff from a Linux machine to a Linux machine. Just a couple directories, not much. Is that much different than what I just did in windows? If it depends on the shell, I'm running sh I believe.

[hillbillybob]

Im not familiar with bash scripting, but I know entire books have been written on the subject, so you may have to google that one.

The books were from O'reilly publishing.

[thejeremy]

Turned out to be a piece of cake.

All you do is start out a text file with #!/bin/bash then type a series of Linux shell commands. To run the script, you can do one of several things:

1. Be in the directory that the file is located, then type "bash FILENAME" (no quotes). This one probably differs from shell to shell.

2. Do a chmod +x FILENAME on the script. Then you can either do ./FILENAME , or move the file to the /bin directory and simply type FILENAME, which is what I did.