How to upload multiple files to FTP from Linux server?

Question

I have for example database backups on my Linux server, and I would like to write a script to upload it to remote FTP. I tried the put command, but it can only transfer one file at a time. Then I tried the mput command, but it just shows me question marks for files I want to transfer (maybe I'm using it wrongly?..)

I tried this:

#!/bin/bash
ftp -n <<EOF
open ftp.server.com
user name password
cd backup
mput /backup/*
EOF

But it won't work. It outputs names of files I want to transfer with question marks at the end of names. Am I missing something or maybe there is better simpler way?

Answer 1

Take a look at ncftp, it comes with an utility (ncftpput) that can be scripted for this purpose:

$ ncftpput -R ftp.server.com /remote/path /backup

The -R flag means recursive mode. You can have your authentication details in a separated file. See the manpage (ncftpput(1)) for details.

Answer 2

Another alternative might be to use CurlFtpFS, a FUSE file system driver that exposes a FTP host as a mounted directory (allowing you to access those files with any regular tools, including cp). I don't know how well it works, but from a quick googling around it looks very promising. CurlFtpFS goes back further than does FUSE actually, so should be stable.

To use it, install the appropriate package for your distribution (for example, Arch and Debian use the package name curlftpfs), load the fuse module, and sudo curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o user=username:password,allow_other, substituting appropriate values for server name, mount point, user name and password.

There are further details at the linked page but that should get you started.

Answer 3

You could use lftp

lftp ftp://user:[e-mail] -e "mirror -e -R /local/folder /remote/folder ; quit"