[LUGSB] Question about FTP.

[Ilya Sukhanov (dotCOMmie)]

Benjamin Kudria wrote:
> You can do SSH, certainly, I also like ncftp.  Looking at my bash history, I 
> did:
> ncftpget -v -T -R -u user ftp.remote.com localdir remotedir
> You probably want to look up the flags in the man page, however.

FTP as a protocol is dead. There are very few cases in which you would still
want to use it. For example send a file to some _public_ ftp server ... and
thats really about it.  The problem with ftp is that it is not secure; if anyone
is monitoring your traffic they can "listen" on all the files you send, and they
can even get your password.

Not using ftp also reduces the number of daemons you have to run.

There are more secure implementations of FTP, primarily FTPS but if you have a
shell account you need to transfer files to and from why bother with it.

For securely transferring of files you should be using SFTP or SCP, both work
over ssh. SFTP allows for browsing of remote files so if you need to get a file
and are not sure of where it is this is the tool for you. On the other hand if
you want to just get a file or get a whole directory, you want to use SCP.

using sftp
sftp user at hostname:/my/remote/dir
sftp> ls
FileA FileB....
sftp> get FileA
sftp> put FileC

as for using scp refer to barry's post.

Best Regards
-- IAS