A little while ago my friend asked me to help him with some Windows commandline scripting. Basically he was waiting for ages for the development team in his company to sort this simple task out and asked me how he can every day automatically download a file from FTP, then rename it with the current date.
I don’t do Windows very much and Linux is just much better for exactly these things, but this seemed like an easy enough challenge.
In the end I didn’t manage to do everything in one file, but I think that two should work just as well when you add them to the Windows task scheduler…
Here are the files with some explanation:
downloader.bat:
@ftp -i -s:”%~f0″&GOTO:EOF
open ftp.someserver.com
[username]
[password]
!:— FTP commands below here —
mget “*.*”
disconnect
The first line starts the windows command line FTP client and the parameters essentially say that everything else in the file should be ignored by the command line itself, but be parsed to the FTP client.
Line two opens the connection and line three and four will send the authentication details. Line six gets all files in the current directory. You could really do here anything you want on the remote and local server, eg: change the local directory path (lcd …), the remote one (cd …) send files (put) or even delete them (rm). At the end, I simply disconnect.
renamer.bat:
for /f “tokens=1-5 delims=/ ” %%d in (“%date%”) do rename “SomeFileName.txt” SomeFileName_%%f-%%e-%%d.txt
In one line: I’m starting a for-loop and I use a tokeniser to delimit the following string into 5 (1-5) sections. %%d specifies the beginning character used for the token (d) and all that follow will be e,f,g…
then I use the %date% (in (“%date%”) function to get the current date. Now, In the do part, I will rename the file from SomeFileName.txt to SomeFileName_yyyy-MM-dd.txt
I hope this makes sense and helps a few people. Best of luck…