I am trying to automate some tasks to update a couple of websites. The site I am working on now needs to do the following:

1. Create a tab delimited .txt file of selected database entries
2. Download the .txt file from above to local machine
3. Upload the .txt file to another website to update database in that site.

Being basically lazy, I want to automate the entire process. I need some guidance on this. Perhaps there are already scripts available but I was not able to find any in a search of script directories.

I have heard of CURL but really know nothing about that library. If you can point me in the right direction to learning that would be fantastic.

You don't need to ftp. On server 1 you create a script that will output the tabbed data, on server 2 you may simply file_get_contents() to retrieve that data by url and do whatever you want with it.

My bad! I forgot the little detail that I only have access to the first server. The other one is another company I am trying to interface with. I have talked to them and though they don't have an API, they are OK with me trying to do the FTP operations using CURL.

Logging in to the ftp server for the other site is easy enough but I still need to upload the tab delimited text file and associated photos.

Why don't you use the ftp related functions of PHP ?
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ftp-fput.php

PHP Code:

// open some file for reading
$file = 'somefile.txt';
$fp = fopen($file, 'r');

// set up basic connection
$conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server);

// login with username and password
$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);

// try to upload $file
if (ftp_fput($conn_id, $file, $fp, FTP_ASCII)) {
    echo "Successfully uploaded $file\n";
} else {
    echo "There was a problem while uploading $file\n";
}

// close the connection and the file handler
ftp_close($conn_id);
fclose($fp);