Custom Directory Parsing

MOVEit Automation provides a high degree of flexibility for downloading from unusual FTP and SSH servers.

When downloading from an FTP server, an automated FTP client must request a directory listing and parse the results to determine the names, date stamps, sizes, and other information about the files on the server. A problem faced by any automated FTP client is that there is no official standard format for this information. Each FTP server vendor chooses its own format for this information. As a result, there are scores of different and incompatible formats. FTP clients must make sense of these many different types of directory listings. SSH clients face a similar situation, although the problem is not as severe.

MOVEit Automation provides the following options to handle this situation:

• Automatic recognition of common servers. By default, MOVEit Automation automatically recognizes and parses directory listings from the most common types of FTP and SSH servers, including Windows, UNIX, Novell, MVS, Unisys, and Van Dyke.
• Blind downloads. If the name of the file is known in advance, select the Blind downloads option when defining an FTP or SSH host, so that MOVEit Automation does not use any directory listing commands when downloding from the host.
• Column-based custom parsing. If the directory listing has a simple tabular format that can be described by rows and columns, you can specify these parameters in the host definition.
• Directory parsing script. You can write a script in VBScript to parse a directory listing. Any format can be handled this way.