NAME

simpleftp - Rudimentary FTP client

SYNOPSIS

simpleftp url [...]

DESCRIPTION

simpleftp is a Perl script that provides basic support for fetching files with FTP in a batch oriented fashion. It takes one or more FTP URLs on the command line. The file(s) will be retrieved from the remote server and placed in the current directory with the same basename as on the remote; e.g., https://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/active.gz is stored as active.gz in the current directory.

The script properly understands usernames, passwords and ports specified as follows:

ftp://user:password@host:port/path/file

BUGS

simpleftp is an extremely poor substitute for more complete programs like the freely available wget or ncftp utilities. It was written only to provide elementary support in INN for non-interactive fetching of the files in https://ftp.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/ or https://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/ without requiring administrators to install yet another package. Its shortcomings as a general purpose program are too numerous to mention, but one that stands out is that downloaded files by simpleftp override existing files with the same name in the local directory.

HISTORY

Tossed off by David C Lawrence <tale@isc.org> for InterNetNews. Rewritten to use "Net::FTP" by Julien Elie.

SEE ALSO

actsync(8).