The problem is progress info as you go and the overhead of shelling out (depending on how you do it - if you want progress info you'd have to do file by file). Often people use FTP because they are transferring large files and that's when progress info is critical.

A programmatic interface/control (most of them) solve that problem in a way that is hard to do for a command line tool to provide.

+++ Rick ---

>Curl is actually one of the ones I had trouble getting to connect to an AS/400 sFTP, but it seemed to work with everything else if I remember right. The WinSCP thing does have a way that it generates a log file so you can see the results of what happened, plus I get return codes so I can tell right away of it failed or not. The other plus is that it lets you use certificates too (which is another issue that I've run into). One of these days I should make a classlib of how I did it and post it in the downloads section.because I've seen this topic come up a number of times in the past.
>
>>Yup. There are a number of good command line utilties out there that do FTP well. Curl is one of them. The big problem with these things is that you can't get decent progress information from them and if something goes wrong it's really hard to recover from errors.
>>
>>Otherwise I agree - the Windows FTP stack it terrible. None of Microsoft's tools built into the OS support reliable SFTP. .NET has limited support but it too is weak and the API is horrible.
>>
>>All that said WinInet and by extension wwFtp work well in 90% of non-secure scenarios. I use it regularily in Help Builder to update thousands of help topics in batch without issues to both Windows and Linux boxes.
>>
>>+++ Rick ---
>>
>>>>>>Hi all,
>>>>>>I'm using wwFTP to send data to a server but I'm getting an error
>>>>>>Win32 APT: The handle is invalid.
>>>>>>I've checked my login details and they are all okay. Any ideas?
>>>>>>~M
>>>>>
>>>>>One question, related to what Thomas indicated, is whether you have sufficient privileges to access that system dll.
>>>>>
>>>>>Hank
>>>>I was running this as a local admin so hadn't thought to check the user security aspect. I ran the program locally to copy to our FTP server and on my PC the file copied up fine. I ran the same program as administrator on the server and it gave the same error.
>>>>~M
>>>
>>>I've had problems when connecting to sFTP in the past, and if the host is a Unix box or a mainframe then the problems got even worse. What I finally did was use WinSCP - which has it's own built in scripting language - and use it instead. I used VFP to create the scripts (which are text files and I think a .bat file) - then used oShell or RUN command to run the scripts. So far this is the only thing that I've found that actually works with 100% of the FTP / sFTP hosts I want to connect too. I've played around with a zillion activex controls and other stuff - so far I've found this to be the best solution.