How to use FTP in a shell script?

FTP is a standard protocol for file transfer. With FTP, files can be transferred to and from a remote host. Remote host has a FTP server installed on it which listens to FTP clients. FTP client is the program which communicates with FTP server.

Suppose that a user has an account on FTP server with username name and password pass.

Now, let's write a script to transfer a file from a remote host to local machine.

#! /bin/sh 
ftp -in host/ip<<END 
user name pass 
cd /var/myremotedir 
lcd /var/mylocaldir 
get file 
close 
bye 
END 
echo 'transfer completed' 

 In the above script, we are transferring file from remote directory /var/myremotedir to local directory /var/mylocaldir. cd is used to change directory at remote server. lcd is used to change directory at local machine. get is used to transfer file from remote directory to local directory. Similarly, we can use put to transfer file from local directory to remote directory. Note: Here cd, lcd, get are ftp commands and not unix commands. FTP server should be installed and listening on remote machine for FTP client to communicate. The username and password used by FTP client should be registered with FTP server.

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