a. One of the requirements of the script was to use ftp to download files from a unix box. For this it is better to create a separate file that contains the commands that need to be run on the ftp prompt and use the file within the batch script. Let us say I needed to connect to the ftp server, change the directory to mydirectory and get all the files having names starting with "myblog".
For this I would create a file called ftptemp.ftp as follows
cd mydirectory
mget *
bye
I would include this file in the batch script. Let us call this file mybatch.bat. In this batch file I first want to change to the directory mylocaldirectory and then download the files to mylocaldirectory. I would create the batch file as follows:
cd c:\mylocaldirectory
ftp -i -s:ftptemp.ftp ftpserver
Option -i turns off interactive prompting for multiple file transfers during the ftp process. This would help when the script has the mget command because it can download multiple files.
Option -s specifies the file that contains the ftp commands.
b. Another requirement was to create a folder that includes the create date and time in the name and then download the files into the newly created folder. In dos batch files, current date is stored in a system variable called date and time is stored in a variable called time. So date could be displayed using the following command:
echo %date%
In DOS batch file processing, a portion of a string can be extracted by using the following command :
%var start,length%
In MS DOS, Jan 13 2010 would be stored as
Wed 01/13/2010
So to extract month portion of the date we would have to use the command %date 4,2%.
The following code can be used to create a folder containing current date and time :
set a=%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%%date:~10,4%%time:~0,2%%time:~3,2%%time:~6,2%%time:~9,2%md %a% cd %a%
md %a%
cd %a%
c. MSDOS batch scripts do not support arrays. There is a convoluted way of simulating arrays that I didn't want to use. So instead of using batch files I used wscript. So to create a string with yesterday's date in the format ddMonyyyy following code could be used:
dtmYesterday = Date() - 1day1 =CStr(DatePart("d",dtmYesterday))
if len(day1)=1 then set day1="0"&day1 end if
year1=Mid(CStr(DatePart("yyyy",dtmYesterday)),3,2)
WScript.StdOut.Write (day1+Mid(MonthName(DatePart"m",dtmYesterday)),1,3)+year1)
This code above will throw an error "invalid handle" , if the vbscript is execute directly at the command prompt :
c:\>vbscriptname.vbs
The code would work if the above script is called using cscript.
c:\>cscript vbscriptname.vbs
In conclusion if I have to write the script again, I would use vbscript instead of msdos batch script.
