FTP Shell - Get all files that do not equal a condition - vba

Question

I'm currently using VBA (Excel) to call the FTP Shell to grab files from a directory. I want to grab all files in the directory that do not contain the wildcard %payment%, but I'm not sure of the syntax.
Sub executeFTPBatch()
Call Shell("FTP -i -s:C:\temp\ftp_directions.txt")
End Sub
So my text file opens the FTP server, inputs the user/pw and then selects the directory. I just need the command to put into the text file. Something like
mget *. * where filename != %payment% "c:\temp\" "ftp://currentfolder"
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I'm not sure, what is "wildcard %payment%".
Though the built-in Windows ftp.exe does not support negative masks in any way.
I can suggest these solutions:
Run the ftp.exe once to get a directory listing (the ls command); parse the listing in your VBA code; select the files you want; and dynamically generate another ftp script to download these files.
Use another command-line FTP client, that supports negative masks.
For example with WinSCP scripting you can do:
Call Shell( _
"C:\path\WinSCP.com /log=C:\path\excel.log /command " & _
"""open ftp://user:password#example.com/"" " & _
"""get /path/* C:\path\ -filemask=|*%payment%*"" " & _
"""exit""")
To ease reading, the above runs these WinSCP commands:
open ftp://user:password#example.com/
get /path/* C:\path\ -filemask=|*%payment%*
exit
If you prefer, you can put the commands to a script file and run the script with the /script= command-line parameter, similarly to the ftp -s:, instead of the /command.
See the guide to Converting Windows FTP script to WinSCP script.
See also WinSCP file mask reference.
Alternatively you can use WinSCP .NET assembly via COM from the VBA code.
(I'm the author of WinSCP)