How to specify username and password in ftp command?

Question

I want to automate a call to ftp in a shell script. If I type

$ftp somehost.domain.com

I am prompted for a username and password. I want to give that username and password as part of the call to ftp. The man page for ftp says I can issue a user command at the ftp prompt -- but I want to login to ftp all in one go. Is that possible? I don't see anything in the flags for ftp. I see that the -s option give me the option of specifying some ftp commands once I have the ftp prompt -- but I need to give the user name to get to the prompt...

Answer 1

Use a .netrc file in your home directory.

The content is:

# machine <hostname> login <username> password <password>
machine ftp.example.com login myuser password $ecret

If this is something you're doing programmatically, write the .netrc before connecting, delete it when you're done.

Answer 2

You can also write a c shell script using a here doc which would go something like this:

#!/bin/sh
HOST='someftpserver.com'
USER='username'
PASSWD='password'
FILES='*.txt'
#
ftp -nv $HOST>$FTPLOG <<END_SCRIPT
quote USER $USER
quote PASS $PASSWD
cd somedirectory
binary
mget $FILES
quit
END_SCRIPT

Answer 3

You could also consider wput or wget as alternatives, depending on your needs.

I haven't used wget recently but I have used wput because I didn't want to create or modify files as suggested in some earlier answers.

For wput, the syntax is:

wput <filename> ftp://<username>:<password>@<address>