A short simple FTP script looks like this :-

You see, SAP looks at EXIT STATUS of shell script at the end. EXIT STATUS of 1 leads to batchjob failure (irrespective whether it was a EXTERNAL COMMAND or EXTERNAL PROGRAM). As not much shell-control is available after a FTP session is established till command "BYE", the only option is to redirect stdout (before connection, to a file) and after the session (BYE) perfom grep for certain strings (back to shell). This particular action is good reason to exit with a EXIT STATUS of non-zero. 

A short simple script looks like this 

#!/bin/sh 
ftp -n foo > success <<EOF 
blah blah 
blah blah 
bye 
EOF 
cat success | grep 'search for string here' 
EXITSTATUS=$? 
exit $EXITSTATUS (I was screwing up here by typing only exit, which always exits with 0) 

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