Copy files from FTP server to local directory?

Question

I want to create a batch file in Windows Server, including the following functions:

• Connection to a FTP server
• Copying the files from there (directory called "out") to a local directory
• if success, then deleting the files from the FTP server
• repeating those steps every 15 minutes

I haven't done that much with batch files so far, so it would be great if you could help me. I know there is the ftp command, and I know how to connect (ftp open), but unfortunately I don't know how to copy those files from there every 15 minutes.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Answer 1

To program ftp from a batch file, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/96269. You need to call ftp like this

ftp -i -s:ftpcommands.txt

where ftpcommands.txt looks something like this:

open ftp.myftpsite.com
username
password
bin
cd out
mget *
del *
bye

For running this every 15 minutes, see other replies (at or Command Scheduler).

(The -i parameter is to turn off interactive prompting - the other way to do this is to add a prompt off command to the commands text file before the mget. Without this, mget will stop and ask you to confirm before getting each file. [Thanks to Adriano for pointing this out!])