Python for Secret Agents - Volume II

Getting logs from a server with ftplib

When we've created an analysis that HQ finds useful, we'll often have to scale this up to work on a larger supply of log files. This will involve acquiring and downloading files from servers without manually clicking a link to download and save each file.

We'll provide a sample of how we might use Python's ftplib to acquire files in bulk for analysis. Once we have the files locally, we can process them using our local_gzip() or local_text() functions.

Here's a function that performs a complex of FTP interaction:

import ftplib def download( host, path, username=None ): with ftplib.FTP(host, timeout=10) as ftp: if username: password = getpass.getpass("Password: ") ftp.login(user=username,passwd=password) else: ...