Advanced FTP/SFTP scripting

Windows command interpreter executes .bat or .cmd files. Some of the features it supports:

• Conditional execution based on exit code of application or value of environment variable;
• Iteration over files matching mask;
• Setting and querying environment variables;
• Simple file path manipulation (extracting directory from path, extracting extension, etc.).

See guide to automation for some examples.

Windows script host is an automation technology for Microsoft Windows that provides scripting capabilities comparable to batch files, but with a greater range of supported features. It is language-independent. By default it interprets and runs plain-text JScript (JavaScript-like) and VBScript. Users can install different scripting engines.

It supports all the features listed in Windows command interpreter section above (with grater flexibility). Plus it includes many advanced functions, you may find useful when using together with WinSCP. See sections below.

To use the examples below copy the JavaScript code to file (e.g. example.js) and use cscript.exe to execute it (use /nologo to suppress banner):

cscript /nologo example.js

You can use WScript.Shell to execute WinSCP console interface tool and feed the script commands (using input stream), without creating temporary script file:

var shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
// run (make it log to XML)
var exec = shell.Exec("winscp.com /log=log.xml");
// feed the commands
exec.StdIn.Write(
    "option batch abort\n" +
    "open session\n" +
    "ls\n" +
    "exit\n");
// wait until it finishes
while (exec.Status == 0)
{
     WScript.Sleep(100);
}

If you want to see WinSCP output replace the trailing while statement with:

// wait until the script finishes while (!exec.StdOut.AtEndOfStream) {

  WScript.Echo(exec.StdOut.ReadAll());

}

You can use MSXML2.DOMDocument object to parse XML log produced by WinSCP. The following example follows up to the previous one (which starts session with XML logging and lists contents of initial directory):

// parse XML log file
var doc = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument");
doc.async = false;
doc.load("log.xml");
 
doc.setProperty("SelectionNamespaces", 
    "xmlns:w='http://winscp.net/schema/session/1.0'");
 
// look for file tags
var nodes = doc.selectNodes("//w:file");
 
WScript.Echo("There are " + nodes.length + " files and subdirectories:");
 
// list the files
for (var i = 0; i < nodes.length; ++i)
{
    var filename = nodes[i].selectSingleNode("w:filename/@value").value;
    WScript.Echo(filename);
}

Running the script will produce output like:

There are 14 files and subdirectories:
.
..
.htaccess
commandline.txt
config.txt
directory_cache.txt
dragext.txt
faq.txt
faq_commandline.txt
faq_dir_default.txt
faq_download_temp.txt
faq_drag_move.txt
faq_error_code.txt
faq_filemanager.txt

If you are familiar with other scripting languages, you can use those.

Note that while you may find installing new scripting engine to Windows troublesome, you may not need to install anything actually. E.g. for using PHP interpreter, you can just grab the Windows binary PHP zip package and extract php.exe and php5ts.dll files out of it. These two binaries alone support most (if not all) features you need. No installing or registration is requried.

Now you can execute PHP script example.php:

<?
system("winscp.com /script=example.txt", $exitcode);
 
if ($exitcode == 0)
{
    echo "success\n";
}
else
{
    echo "error\n";
    // handle an error
}
?>

with simple command:

php.exe example.php

• Troubleshooting;
• Scripting documentation;
• Guide to automation;
• FAQ about scripting;
• Example scripts.