Mark Freeze wrote:

A year or so ago I had a problem downloading a file via ftp onto a
Windows box with WS_FTP.  The file was about 100MB and I started
downloading the file while my customer was still uploading, so I only
got about half of the file.  WS_FTP allowed me to do this with no
error. (Which I thought was kinda crazy.)

Now I have an offsite ftp spot that my customers use to send me files
at random times during the day. I want to automatically download and
process these files onto my box as soon as they appear on the site so
I was thinking that I would scehedule up a cron job to look for these
files every 10 min. When I do this am I going to have the problem of
seeing the file and trying to get it as they are uploading?  Some of
these files are over 100MB and might take my customer a while to
upload.  Someone told me to make sure that I have exclusive access to
the file before I download it, but since I have no control over the
ftp server I'm not sure on how to accomplish that task.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Mark.


On the subject of knowing when to grab the file so that you aren't using an incomplete file, what you would want the sending process to do is to send a second file to use as a semaphore for your process. So, that just after it sends you the file that you are interested in have it send you a small file that will signal your process that the first send it complete and that you can be assured that the file was sent in entirety. Then have your process delete the semaphore file when it is done processing the large file.

Jeff G.

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Jeff Groves
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]             Web Site: http://www.krenim.org/
blog: http://blogs.krenim.org/Jeff

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