bad return code in ncftpget

droid

As advised in this news group, I have switched from wget to ncftpget,
to backup my web site. But I am troubled by a bad return code in my
script.

----------- Snippet from "bak_website" bash shell script: -----------

echo "bak_website: Preparing to archive ftp://mywebsite.com"
ncftpget -RVd ../ncftpget.log -u user -p passwd ftp://mywebsite.com .

# move and list the archived files
val=$?
echo "return code=$val"
if [ $val -eq 0 ]; then
# move files from dir n to dir n+1
mvarc
else
echo "bak_website failed"
fi

----------------------------- End script -----------------------------

This is the output:

bak_website: Preparing to archive ftp://mywebsite.com
ncftpget: server said: File successfully transferred
return code=3
bak_website failed

On inspection, it seems the entire website (as far as I can tell) was
successfully transferred. The ncftpget.log file is 8KB - ncftpget
does a lot of business - but grepping it for "error", "fail" and
"warn" returns nothing.

I'm not sure what, if anything, is failing. I get consistent results
every run, total bytes downloaded increases a little each day, as you
would expect. Also, the total bytes are just slightly less than what
I get with wget, which makes sense because wget adds a ".listing" file
to each directory.

If I modify the ncftpget command line so it gets just a directory from
the site, the "File successfully transferred" message is not output
and
the return code=0. Could the return code be set to 3 by this server
message instead of by ncftpget?

--
Every solution breeds new problems.