FTP From A Command Line

Not an obsolete skill. Many people still use it every day. It is sometimes desirable to use command line FTP over a GUI because of the loading time involved.

Windows 98 and onward have a built in command line FTP client. All versions of Linux and UNIX all have a standard FTP client built in.

To use standard FTP, simply type in “ftp ftp.example.com” or “ftp 192.168.1.50” (Citing examples) Then if you are using an anonymous login, enter in anonymous as the username and your e-mail address as the password.

The main commands to know are: “bin” to set binary mode. “hash” to print hash mark printing. (This prevents you from being disconnected if you are transferring a very large file) .. “prompt” to turn prompting on or off. Then from there, the major commands are “ls” to list files, “cd” to change directory, “get <filename>” to get a file and “put <filename>” to put or upload a file. To make things easier, one can use mget or mput with a wildcard such as * so you can transfer an entire directory.

GUI clients are good for transferring very large amounts of files, but if one just wants to transfer one file or a few files quickly, using a Command Line FTP client is much better and faster.