SIMPLEFTP(1) InterNetNews Documentation SIMPLEFTP(1)NAME
simpleftp - Rudimentary FTP client
SYNOPSIS
simpleftp url [...]
DESCRIPTION
simpleftp is a Perl script 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., "ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CON‐
FIG/active.gz" is stored as active.gz in the current directory.
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 <ftp://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 simpleftp does not understand the complete syntax of
URLs, only the hostname and pathname parts -- it will not understand
username, password, port or parameter strings.
The Perl libraries that it uses have the advantage of coming with Perl,
even older versions of Perl, but are not "-w" safe and do not work
nearly as well as Net::FTP.
HISTORY
Tossed off by David C Lawrence <tale@isc.org> for InterNetNews.
$Id: simpleftp.1,v 1.3 2003/04/03 00:54:02 rra Exp $
SEE ALSOactsync(8)INN 2.4.0 2003-04-02 SIMPLEFTP(1)
