Best Way To Test If Remotely Transferred File Is Complete 1

[CuthbertDibbleGrub]

Files are being transferred to a local directory remotely (from a server with no rsh access). I'm writing a script to loop round every minute or so and action a file once it appears. I need to test whether the file transfer has completed fully.

I was going to...

a. Test that it's there with 'if [ -f filename ]'
b. Get file size with a combination of 'ls -l' and 'cut'
c. Sleep for a bit
d. Get file size again
e. Compare and loop if different otherwise action and move file

But surely there's a better way!

 

[tikual]

The best way should be the remote server to do a test of file transfer successful or not and then pass the result to your local server rather than running a endless loop to dominate your server cpu usage. If you can't control the remote one. Could the script run by an hour/day or not? Because I don't suggest you to do it for only one file status.

Just my suggestion

tikual

 

[CuthbertDibbleGrub]

Tikual,

The files are being sent on an adhoc basis and I unfortuinately have no control over them or the remote server. The CPU usage is low (test server) so I don't mind this script running in the background as long as it sleeps between checking for a file's existence.

 

[tikual]

It seems to be your only way to do that. Then enhance your script efficiency. Can you post your script here? Just think that you may get the size by a smart way.

tikual

 

[KenCunningham]

I think there have been previous threads to chack whether a file is in use (ie possibly being written to) using fuser. If fuser returns nothing, then presumably the file is complete.

 

[CuthbertDibbleGrub]

Many thanks Ken, I've just experimented with fuser and it returns something when the file is being transferred - excellent! Now for a command better than 'ls -l' to get the file size (as a fail safe). 'sum' returns checksum, so maybe that'll do the trick - surprised there seems to be no specialised UNIX command to return a file's size.

 

[KenCunningham]

Cheers for the star - a command like:

ls -la | grep <filename> | tr -s ' ' ' ' | cut -f5 -d ' '

will give you the size of the file.