meaning of ftp -s in shell scripting

Question

can some me tell me what does s means in ftp -s (shell scripting)?

Answer 1

I'm assuming, that you're on a Windows machine and not on *nix (as "shell" suggests). On Windows "ftp -s:filename.dat" stands for the default ftp client which reads it's commands from the file "filename.dat". So the -s switch tells the client to read a list of commands from a file and execute them.

Current ftp client on *nix does not have that switch, so if you're on a *nix machine please show part of your script, so we can investigate further.

Answer 2

From the ftp manual page:

-s srcaddr Uses srcaddr as the local IP address for all connections.

If you simply mean what -s means in general: it means that it is a "switch" or "option". These "options/switches" let you change the behavior of a command without having to go too deep into it and without having to edit any default settings.

So, if you were to translate ftp -s SRCADDR into English, it would say:

Do the ftp command but use SRCADDR instead of the default local IP address for this session.