I created a bugzilla report against the ftp client in FC5 and after a
couple of rounds of reopening (NOTABUG), it's been closed as "WONTFIX".
Ref. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=196141
It has to do with the ftp client always ending with an exit code of
zero, regardless of what happened during the actual ftp session.
Is it unreasonable to expect that ftp exits with a non-zero exit code
when something goes wrong? (I was asking that it return the highest code
it received from the server... well-documented error codes specific to
the ftp protocol; return zero if the actual code is in the 2xx range
would be acceptable)
I wanted to use the .netrc mechanism to provide a little script to ftp
the contents of a directory to a site. The ftp command is invoked by
another process (i.e. not a human using cli reading the text responses),
but that's useless when ftp always ends with zero.
Yes, I can write some Perl code to do this, and not use the ftp
command.... but the ftp command is already available, the .netrc
mechanism suits my purpose in this application...
The only reason I'm pursuing this any further is because I feel "it is
the right thing to do". I've since found another solution to my problem
because ftp, as it is now, is of now use to me, except as a cli tool.
I may re-open it again and provide a diff file.... but it certainly
doesn't appear that would be well received...
Regards,
Don Russell
