Uploading Files by Wrapping sftp in a Shell Script

Overview

A third party providing a data analytics service instructed us
to store files on a specified server and path, in a specified format.

They also added:
“Please use sftp as the only allowed protocol.”

Since we also needed to run this on a schedule,
we looked into whether it could be written as a shell script,
and put together the following.

shell

Point

• Using expect to feed the password ahead of time to the sftp command, which is normally interactive

• Specifying bachmode no with the -o option to avoid the following error

Permission denied (publickey,password).
Connection closed

• The -b option lets you write the processing to run after the sftp login into a batch file

In our case, we needed to run the shell script on a schedule via Jenkins or cron,
so we made it possible to explicitly specify the contents of the batch file.

That’s all.