Ftp

Revision as of 20:19, 5 May 2006

ftp is the default client implementation of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) on FreeBSD systems. ftp is IPV6 aware, and is capable of creating, deleting, modifying and transferring files to and from remote machines running an FTP server that supports these operations. It is also capable of retrieving files using HTTP (from a "web server").

These days, because the FTP protocol requires two ports (clumsy with firewalls), and cannot support encrypted transactions (it must be wrapped or tunneled in another protocol - also tricky because it requires two ports), many people prefer to use the slower but more secure sftp or rsync, which use the SSH subsystem called SFTP.

Common flags

-a don't login, use anonymous login
-A force active mode
-i no interactive prompts
-p force passive mode
-P change the port to this
-v verbose