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up vote 4 down vote favorite

This is a very basic question I am just quite new to bash and couldn't figure out how to do this. Googling unfortunately didn't get me anywhere.

My goal is to connect with sftp to a server, upload a file, and then disconnect.

I have the following script:

UpdateJar.sh

#!/bin/bash

sftp -oPort=23 [email protected]:/home/kalenpw/TestWorld/plugins
#Change directory on server
#cd /home/kalenpw/TestWorld/plugins

#Upload file
put /home/kalenpw/.m2/repository/com/Khalidor/TestPlugin/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/TestPlugin-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

exit

the issue is, this script will establish an sftp connection and then do nothing. Once I manually type exit in connection it tries to execute the put command but because the sftp session has been closed it just says put: command not found.

How can I get this to work properly?

Thanks

share|improve this question
    
Related: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/22726/… – Elder Geek yesterday
up vote 8 down vote accepted

You can change your script to pass commands in a here-document, e.g.,

#!/bin/bash

sftp -oPort=23 [email protected]:/home/kalenpw/TestWorld/plugins <<EOF
put /home/kalenpw/.m2/repository/com/Khalidor/TestPlugin/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/TestPlugin-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar   
exit
EOF

The << marker followed by the name (EOF) tells the script to pass the following lines until the name is found at the beginning of the line (by itself).

share|improve this answer
    
Awesome that did exactly what I needed. I will have to read up on here documents. Thanks for the quick answer I'll accept it in 8 min. – kalenpw yesterday
    
No problem (I took a look for a duplicate but only found one closed as "unclear"). – Thomas Dickey yesterday
    
Are you sure the server won't choke on the shell-script's comments? – alk yesterday
    
Also this approach depends on the kind of shell. – alk yesterday
    
@alk the script works with and without comments – kalenpw 20 hours ago
up vote 3 down vote

You can also use the -b option of sftp to indicate a file containing commands for sftp.

For example, you can put all your commands in file sftp_commands.txt:

cd /home/kalenpw/TestWorld/plugins
put /home/kalenpw/.m2/repository/com/Khalidor/TestPlugin/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/TestPlugin-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
exit

and run sftp as:

sftp -oPort=23 -b sftp_commands.txt [email protected]:/home/kalenpw/TestWorld/plugins

Or you can pass the commands via STDIN too if you don't want to use a file.

From man sftp:

-b batchfile

Batch mode reads a series of commands from an input batchfile instead of stdin. Since it lacks user interaction it should be used in conjunction with non-interactive authentication. A batchfile of ‘-’ may be used to indicate standard input. sftp will abort if any of the following commands fail: get, put, reget, rename, ln, rm, mkdir, chdir, ls, lchdir, chmod, chown, chgrp, lpwd, df, symlink, and lmkdir. Termination on error can be suppressed on a command by command basis by pre‐ fixing the command with a ‘-’ character (for example, -rm /tmp/blah*).

share|improve this answer
up vote 3 down vote

You might prefer to use scp instead of sftp. scp behaves much like the ordinary cp command does, but the files can be remote:

scp -P 23 /home/kalenpw/.m2/repository/com/Khalidor/TestPlugin/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/TestPlugin-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar [email protected]:/home/kalenpw/TestWorld/plugins

This copies the file on you local machine into a directory on the remote machine without having to use the old-school ftp-style command interface.

The ssh, scp, and sftp services are usually available if any of them are; the same daemon program provides all of them simultaneously. In principle the server's administrator could choose to disable any of them, but in practice that's quite rare.

share|improve this answer
    
Didn't know about scp beforehand looks very useful. And you were right scp is already available on my machine – kalenpw yesterday

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