Scripting FTP in Windows PowerShell
What was supposed to be a straighforward task took me more than an hour. I out-file my commands to a text file: "ftpUserName`r`nSecretPassword`r`nDIR`r`nQUIT" | out-file ftpCommands.txt And then: ftp -i -s:ftpCommands.txt But it did not work. It says: 331 Password required for f. and after a while: User cannot log in. Login failed. It turns out that the default encoding for Out-File is Unicode. That added two bytes to the beginning of the file ftpCommands.txt. Somehow, the -s option of ftp does not open the file in the Windows way but treated the file literally byte for byte. By explictly adding -Encoding ASCII to the Out-File command solved the problem.