You are painted into a corner here. What you want to do is very hard at best and in, some cases, impossible. Some more work needs to be done on the windows system to give you some way of more easily identifying the file you need. However, you can manually look at the output of dir. When you do, can you see which file to get? Bear in mind that, on unix, for old files you get "year" replacing the timestamp. Choosing the newer of two different 1-year old files would not be possible. If you can pick out the file that is needed, so can a very clever script. But be warned, this is not a piece of cake and it is not a job for a beginning script writer. If you want to go down that path, you might be able to get some ideas from: HardFeed a recursive ftp script.