FTP or Giving an Environment to Spawned Cmd.exe's

[ptgThug]

This is a lenghty post, I understand, but my problem requires a healthy level of detail to convey, and I'm sure requires a formidable knowledge to address.

What I want to ultimately do is FTP a file to an OS/390 mainframe, trigger a JCL script, and download the results. Since the mainframe is EBCDIC (instead of ANSI ASCII), the FTP session requires a SITE QUOTE command to do the conversion, another one to allow me to trigger the JCL job, and another one to set the file access back to normal.

I can find VB's API calls for FTP put and get, but I need to use site. If there is an API call for that, then all of my problems are solved.

Since I don't know of one, I am spawning a CMD /C and telling it to run an ftp /s with an input file. Since the CMD starts with no evironmental variables set (such as path), I have to explicitly say C:\Winnt\System32\ftp.exe /s et al. Spawning the CMD this way (with CreateProcess&()), I wait for it to exit (using the handle returned in CreateProcess&() in WaitForSingleObject&()).

To trouble shoot, I am using CMD /K and setting the focus to normal (calling the CMD with CreateProcess&()). I get to see the ftp session say, "mainframe.usps.gov: Unknown host". I fear that it is not resolving the name lookup correctly (if that makes any sense).

I'm hoping someone has an idea, and I'm including a bit of code if it will help:

Dim strCmdLine As String
    strCmdLine = "C:\WINNT\System32\cmd.exe /K C:\WINNT\system32\ftp.exe -n -s:" & App.Path & "\ftp.txt mainframe.usps.gov"

lngRETVAL = CreateProcess&(vbNullString, strCmdLine, 0, 0, 1, NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS, 0&, vbNullString, udtStartupInfo, udtProcessInfo)
lngRETVAL = WaitForSingleObject&(udtProcessInfo.hProcess, -1)
lngRETVAL = CloseHandle&(udtProcessInfo.hProcess)

If anyone has any specific questions, and think they can help, just ask. I can't send but so much of the project since all the machines are hidden behind the firewall and I do have proprietary interests to consider (but I am open source at heart).

Many thanks in advance,
Travis

You could try to open the site inside the ftp.txt script instead of from the command line(guess it does work inside ftp right?).

open mainframe.usps.gov
user me
pass ***
......
Do stuff
......
close
bye

[ptgThug]

And that is what I do. I guess I didn't do a good job of explaining that before.

And that worked when I was doing all of this with a Perl script. Now I get Unknown host:mainframe.usps.gov. It does not appear to be doing any name resolution.

I'm still playing with stuff. It likes IP addresses, but I get unknown socket error if I use 56.x.x.x or bad address if I use 56.x.x.x:21.

-Travis