If you are reading this on-line then I have finally managed to alter my
Expect script to work with the Mac OS X version of ftp. This is part
of the long drawn-out battle to transfer my projects to my PowerBook so
that my old desktop (circa 1998) can be repurposed.
Background: The way I write this site involves creating a working copy on my local system, so I can check it before I upload it to the real server. The program for doing the upload is a Tcl script using Don Libes's Expect extension to control the FTP program. My script walks the directory structure of my working copy, and issues FTP commands to upload the files that have been changed.
I got Expect by dint of installing the new TclTkAqua-Batteries Included distribution of Tcl.
Apple's FTP program (really I suppose I should say BSD's) rather threw me because it starts in 'passive' mode.
My script swiches on passive mode, since that's generally a good idea.
The problem
is that ftp uses the same command to turn an option off (if it is on)
as turns it on when it is off. To allow for different FTP programs to have different
default states, I wrote a routine that issues the
passive command, and examines the resulting message to determine
whether this resulted in switching it on or off, and reissues the
command if necessary to get the result I want.
Apple's FTP has a cute feature that displays a progress indicator (a line of asterisks) as it uploads large files. My program interpreted the unexpected text as an error message and gave up. It took me a while to work out what was happenign because it only balked at large files -- short transfers did not get the progress indicator. So today I wrote more code to try to turn this option off.
Now it works fine. Except that partway through pointlessly uploading a
whole slew of files that are in fact already uploaded but have the wrong
timestamps my ethernet is suddenly failing. When this happens I find I
cannot ping anything on the network. I wonder if this is a
hardware fault, as unplugging the ethernet cable and plugging it in
again makes the problem go away.
I just managed to get it to work by running ping continuously in
another window. Did this help or was it coincidence? Sigh.