One little victory.

Huzzah! With a lot of help from the TCSH man pages, I have achieved a small victory. I have written a shell script to download selected files on my web server to my local computer.

I knew it was possible to automate the process, but working in Windows I had no idea how to do it. Writing batch files is an arcane science, and I could never get them to work, let alone work with a scheduler. I admit this may be due to my own ignorance, ineptitude, or simply not knowing how to ssh into a linux machine and pass arguments to find files a certain date or older on a Win32 machine. If you know, why the hell didn’t you tell me before?

However, this task was something I always knew I should be able to automate, even if I couldn’t (and that knowledge really stuck in my craw.) Instead, I stuck with what I knew; every week I’d boot up a graphical FTP client, find the files I wanted to back up, FTP them down to a selected directory, and then maybe clean them up - or maybe not.

But no more!

I've been dying to set this up - backing things up is so fucking tedious, and so fucking unnecessary for a human to do. The next step will be to automate the ssh login, so I can put this as part of my login script or schedule it with crontab - but that's research for another night.

I will now cross off one very small line item on my network todo list and go to bed a happy man.