Transferring directory trees over ftp
By Gian Zas
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:
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$> ncftpget -R -u <user_account> ftp.moove-it.com /home/gian/migration_h /remote_directory |
* -R copy a whole directory
* ftp.xxx.x is the remote ftp server
* /home/yyy is the local destination
* and /remote_xx is the ftp directory to be transfered
PUT a directory is trivial too, just invoke the ncftpput command:
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$> ncftput -R -u <user_account> ftp2.moove-it.com /home/gian/migration_h /remote_directory |
be happy!