Batch SFTP commands with Python and Paramiko

Question

I am porting some batch jobs from Window to Linux. These are.bat scripts on Windows and I am rewriting them in Python to run on Linux

On Windows, we currently use putty to SFTP files and run commands like this:

psftp user@host -i privatekey.ppk -batch -b script.txt

This executes the putty SFTP commands found in script.txt in batch. Example below:

SCRIPT.TXT example

 cd mydir
 lcd outbox
 get myremotefile.txt mylocalfile.txt
 get myotherremotefile.txt myotherlocalfile.txt
 bye

I am trying to find a way to use the same batch script (script.txt) in my python script to minimise the amount of changes overall. I've been looking into paramiko but so far I have not been able to find a way to execute the sftp commands in bulk via a script file.

An alternative would be to spawn a sub-process to execute the sftp command with the -b option but would prefer a python native solution if possible.

What do you think? Are there other options out there to solve this?

Answer 1

The commands in you script are psftp commands. Not "SFTP commands" (there are no SFTP commands). In general, no other application nor library understands them. Except for OpenSSH sftp , as PuTTY psftp was made to be somewhat compatible.

If you want to use a native Python SFTP library, like Paramiko or pysftp, you will need to use its API. And that means rewriting your code. It's not difficult.