Transferring files from one AIX server to another AIX server in binary mode

UNIX AIX
1

Hi,

I am a newbie to AIX. We have 2 AIX5.3 servers in our environment, I need to transfer some files in Binary mode from one server to another and some files in ASCII mode from one server to another server. Could you please help me as to how I need to do that?

Thanks,
Rakesh

2

The commands in the ftp-client are "as" for ASCII mode and "bi" for binary mode (the default).

But if both your systems are AIX systems you don't need any ASCII mode at all:

Between different system architectures (like UNIX on one hand and Windows on the other and mainframe computers on a third) the way ASCII text files are stored is different: for instance in Windows a line is separated from its following line by a CR/LF (carriage return/linefeed, 0x0D 0x0A) character sequence. In UNIX it is only a newline character (^M). This has to be converted when files are being transferred from UNIX to Windows or vice versa. Exactly this conversion is what ASCII mode does, nothing more, nothing less. Binary mode is just switching off this conversion for binary data which do not need such a translation.

Of course such a translation is also not needed between two systems of the same architecture.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

3

Hi Bakunin,

Thanks for your reply.

I tried to FTP but I am having a problem.

I have logged into server 1, I typed ftp server2, but it's saying connection refused, could you help me what I need to do?

Regards,
Rakesh

4

You could install "scp" from the openssh packages (also needs openssl), then use that to copy, which will guarantee binary format.

5

This can have a lot of possible reasons but the following 2 are the most likely:

  • server2 has no running ftp server
  • a firewall in between prevents ftp communication

I hope this helps.

bakunin