ftp dir not returning date/time consistantly 1

[ThatRickGuy]

Hi everyone, I'm not sure if this is the best forum for this, but my Unix knowledge is rather limited. I ran into a problem this morning with a number of automated processes that pull files off of a Unix server via FTP. Before downloading the files, they check the mod date to make sure it is newer than yestarday. Some of these files are showing up with out the year in the time stamp (they show either Mon dd hh:MM or Mon dd YYYY). Is there anyway to force the server to return full date/time stamps when anyone uses the Dir command? or some way to do it for a specific FTP session?

I can change the date parsing in the code of our automated processes, but I'd rather avoid date kludge fixes and a deployment of these applications.

Thanks,
-Rick

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[columb]

The behaviour of the 'dir' command in ftp is dependent on the ftp server at the other end, i.e. the Unix end, and this can vary.
On my AIX systems the 'dir' command returns the same info as the unix command 'ls -al'. The default for 'ls -al' under AIX is to return the timestamp as
Mon dd yyyy for files over six months old
Mon dd hh:mm for files under six months old

In short it looks like this behaviour is linked to the underlying operating system and not easily changed.

I'm not sure there's an easy answer. If you have ssh available on the Unix server you might want to look at utilities like 'plink' (part of the PuTTY family) which would allow you to run Unix commands from the Windows shell. However, looking at what you have achieved so far, it's too much solution for the problem.

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Columb Healy

 

[ThatRickGuy]

Thanks for the heads up on the 6 month window. At least if need be I can use that for parsing the date in the code of the applications.

-Rick

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