FTP is File Transfer Protocol. SFTP
is secure FTP. In this article let us review how to connect and login to a
remote ftp server for downloading and uploading files using ftp or sftp
command. Most of the ftp commands are applicable to sftp. So, wherever ftp is
mentioned, you can use sftp also.
1. Connect to a FTP site
Connect to a particular FTP server using ftp
command as shown below.
Syntax:
# ftp IP/hostname
or
$ ftp
ftp> open IP/hostname
You can directly open connection with a remote
host using it’s IP or host name from the command line. You can also go to ftp
prompt and use open command to connect with remote host.
It will ask you for the user name and password
to login. On some public domain FTP server, you can use “anonymous” username
with any email address as the password to connect.
2. Download a file using ftp
Use the get command to download file from a
remote ftp server as shown below.
ftp> get FILENAME
You have to be in the right mode to download
files. i.e binary or ascii mode. Use ascii mode for transferring text files,
and binary mode for all other type of files.
Download the file and save it with another
name. In the following example, index.html file will be downloaded and saved as
my.html on the local server.
ftp> get index.html my.html
Fetching /home/groups/index.html to
my.html
/home/groups/index.html
100% 2886 1.4KB/s 00:02
3. Changing FTP Mode to binary or ascii
Go to ftp Ascii mode
ftp> ascii
200 Type set to A.
Go to ftp Binary mode
ftp> binary
200 Type set to I.
4. Uploading a file to FTP server
Use put command to upload a file to a remote
ftp server as shown below.
ftp> put filename
5. Changing the remote and local directory
Apart from downloading or uploading a file, you
may want to change either the remote or local directory, which you can do using
cd and lcd respectively.
Change the remote server current directory
using cd command
ftp> pwd
257 "/myftpserver" is
current directory.
ftp> cd dir1
250 CWD command successful.
"/myftpserver/dir1" is current directory.
ftp> pwd
257 "/myftpserver/dir1"
is current directory.
Change the local machine current directory
using lcd command
ftp> !
$ pwd
/home/sathiya/FTP
$ exit
exit
ftp> lcd /tmp
Local directory now /tmp
ftp> !
$ pwd
/tmp
Note:
* executing ! takes
you to the shell.
* prompt starts with
ftp> is ftp prompt.
* prompt starts with
$ is shell command line.
6. Listing the contents of remote directory
from FTP
You can view the content of a remote directory
using the ls / dir command.
ftp> ls
7. FTP Help
Type help or ? to view list of all available
ftp commands.
For a detailed help on a particular ftp command
use:
ftp> help COMMAND
8. Downloading multiple files with mget command
mget is for fetching multiple files from ftp
server. You can use globs to download multiple files. For example, *.html will
download all html files. The glob expansion are done on the remote server. So,
it depends on the operating system of the remote server.
ftp> mget *.html
Fetching /ftptest/features.html to
features.html
/ftptest/features.html
100% 2256
2.2KB/s 00:01
Fetching /ftptest/index.html to
index.html
/ftptest/index.html
100% 2886 2.8KB/s 00:01
Fetching /ftptest/othertools.html
to othertools.html
/ftptest/othertools.html
100% 2282
2.2KB/s 00:01
Fetching /ftptest/samplereport.html
to samplereport.html
/ftptest/samplereport.html
100% 15KB
7.3KB/s 00:02
Fetching /ftptest/usage.html to
usage.html
/ftptest/usage.html
100% 2340 2.3KB/s 00:01
To view the file names before downloading, you
can also use mls command as shown below.
ftp> mls *.html -
/ftptest/features.html
/ftptest/index.html
/ftptest/othertools.html
/ftptest/samplereport.html
/ftptest/usage.html
9. Uploading multiple files with mput command
Use mput to upload multiple files together.
This works similar to the mget command. The following example uploads all the
*.html file from local server to remote server.
ftp> mput *.html
10. Close a FTP connection
Without exiting the ftp prompt you may want to
open a connection to another server. In that case, execute close command.
ftp> open ftp.your_server.com
Already connected to NNN.com, use
close first.
ftp> close
221 Goodbye.
ftp> open ftp.your_server.com
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