How to improve this FTP (shell) function?

I have about a ton of scripts using the following function:

# Copies files over using FTP.
# Configurations set at the beggining of the script
# @param    $1 = FTP Host
#           $2 = FTP User
#           $3 = FTP User password
#           $4 = Source file name
#           $5 = destination directory
#           $6 = local directory
doftp() {
    log_message_file "INFO" "Starting FTP"

    ftp_hst=$1
    ftp_usr=$2
    ftp_pwd=$3
    sourcefile=$4
    destdir=$5
    locdir=$6

    ftp -nv $FTPH << EOF 2> ftp.err.$$
quote USER $ftp_usr
quote PASS $ftp_pwd
cd $destdir
lcd $locdir
bin

put $sourcefile

bye
EOF

    if [ "$(wc ftp.err.$$|cut -d" " -f8)" != 0 ] ; then
        log_message_file "ERROR" "Problem uploading files: $(cat  ftp.err.$$)"
    else
        log_message_file "INFO" "FTP finished"
    fi
    rm ftp.err.$$
}

It works, does it's job, unless ftp fails. Fortunately for me, the scripts are quite precise and the FTP almost never fails. But this is one of these rare moments when one has the chance (time) to go back and review code marked in the TODO list. Only problem is that I'm not too sure on how to improve it... I'd take you guys recommendations on what to change there.

One obvious problem is the error parsing from the ftp, which is a totally lame. But I'll also take thoughts in other parts of the function :)

Worth mentioning this is run in a AIX server? Oh, and no, I cannot use SFTP :(

Thanks for any input!

ps.: log_message_file is just a basic logging... has no effect in the function.

good documentation
good variable names
good indentation, you might want to read about <<-EOF (the '-' being the item I intend to highlight with this comment. Using that feature allows you to indent (must use tab chars) the whole here-document to match indenting of rest of script.
good use of tmp filename with $$ (depending on how much this function gets used, you might want to append the parent script name as part of the tmp name, to further disambiguate, but low priority)
good use of $(cat ftp.err.$$) i.e. actually showing the error message, rather than just a message like 'error occured' (I see this all the time, what error? what was the msg?!)
you could extend the ftp service to use mput, but then you have to understand the vagaries of your particular ftp client AND make a note to your self that any time there is a change of ftp client you'll need to check if your mput ${fileNames} variable still works as you expect.
possibly the one place to think about improvement would be to use a case statement to parse the STDERR output, but again, the added benefit may not be worth the maintenance cost in the future.

errMsgs="$(cat ftp.err.$$)"

case "${errMsgs}" in
    *warningStrings* ) print "warning found, msg was ${errMsg} ;;
    *errorStrings* ) print "error found, msg was ${errMsg} ;;
    *fatalStrings* ) pring "fatal error found, can't continue, msg was ${errMsg} ;;
esac

I hope this helps.