I have a script that should list all files in an SFTP server and output that in a file (to be used by another script). The cmd that produces the needed output is:

echo ls | psftp -l myusername -pw mycomplexpwd FTPServerHostname > C:/Users/myuser/Desktop/ls.txt

and this would be invoked by Windows Task Scheduler couple of times a day. For some reason, when scheduling this command (in a .bat file) and running via user SYSTEM, the output file would only contain this:

Remote working directory is /
psftp> quit

While when using another user, the output is as expected (listing of all files) -see https://serverfault.com/questions/1084015/why-psftp-script-is-failing-when-ran-as-system. I need a way to script that and be able to run it as SYSTEM like the rest of my scripts in that system. I've also tried the below:

psftp -l myusername -pw mycomplexpwd FTPServerHostname < C:/Users/myuser/Desktop/lscmd.txt > C:/Users/myuser/Desktop/ls.txt

and:

psftp -l myusername -pw mycomplexpwd FTPServerHostname -b C:/Users/myuser/Desktop/lscmd.txt > C:/Users/myuser/Desktop/ls.txt

where lscmd.txt contains the below:

ls

And the behavior is the same. Anything I can do so I can do the needed behavior?

OS is Windows Server 2012 R2.

CodePudding user response：

So turns out there is an added step of trusting the sFTP server in the first connection (or adding the key to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\SshHostKeys). Check the related serverfault question for (slightly) more details of how I did it. Both the echo ls | psftp -l myusername -pw mycomplexpwd FTPServerHostname > C:/Users/myuser/Desktop/ls.txt and the other variants (e.g. -b) worked afterwards.