Automating FTP file transfers

[Limey Drink]

Hi all,

Firstly :-) , is there any where I can search through archived newsgroup
posts so I am not cluttering up the newsgroup with repeated queries ?

And secondly :-), I know this has probably been discussed before but.

I am wanting to do some scripting to automate a few administration tasks,
one of the first tasks is automating FTP file transfers.

I would like to know if the following could be made more robust using python
and its FTP libraries rather than executing native OS commands in a shell
script.

Basically I need to...
1.  Check on the local system for new files in a specific directory
If new files exist then...
2.  Connect to a remote FTP server.
3.  Transfer local files to a specific directory on the remote FTP server.
4.  Then remove/archive local files and end session.

This is critical operation and though while in the past I have written DOS
scripts etc. to do simple tasks I have not needed to check for errors as
they weren't absolutely critical tasks.  I am going to need to run this
overnight using AT or CRON then I need to know about file transfer errors
etc. and other problems that f I were actually performing the FTP transfer
manually I would get feedback of the problem and could re-try the operation.

Any help would be very appreciated.