Ok, get up! it was only a nightmare, but if a strange reason causes you must accomplish that task you may wish get/put directories recursively from/to a ftp server.

The bad news are that the FTP protocol doesn’t supports this operation, you can get only an individual file or a group of files that expands some wildcard expression, but you can’t get/put recursively an entire directory.

Luckily ncftp saves the day, it’s a free ftp client (free as in beer and free as non-private), that supports many features like background processing and directory tree copy.

So, to GET the contents a whole directory tree just invoke ncftpget command:

$> ncftpget -R -u <user_account> ftp.moove-it.com /home/gian/migration_h /remote_directory

* -R copy a whole directory
* ftp.xxx.x is the remote ftp server
* /home/yyy is the local destination
* and /remote_xx is the ftp directory to be transfered

PUT a directory is trivial too, just invoke the ncftpput command:

$> ncftput -R -u <user_account> ftp2.moove-it.com /home/gian/migration_h /remote_directory

be happy!