Transferring directory trees over ftp

Posted by Gian Zas on April 19, 2009

Imagine all the people having to live without ssh and an assigned job related to hosting migrations with low bandwidth access, what a painfull world…

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!

Trackbacks

Use this link to trackback from your own site.