UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi.
I'm trying to copy multiple folders from the remote machine to the local machine. I wrote a batch file to run an ftp window.
The problem I am having is that the only command to copy files is mget *, and this copies only files, not folders.

For example, ftp ts555
cd ts555/test
' test has an unspecified number of folders, anywhere from 1 - 6

I cannot type mget * because it will not systematically go into each folder and get the files, it will just give me an error.

I do not know the names of the folders in ts555 because they change daily.
I somehow need to access all the files in all the folders in ts555

Thank you!

Look for a recursive option to mget in it's manpage. I would, but I don't have mget.

You can use ncftp to do recursive gets on a remote ftp server. Just issue "get -R *"

mget ist not a command but a subcommand of ftp, therefore you probably "have" it (as long as you didn't purge the ftp command from your system) and it neither has a manpage nor a recursive-option.

The bad news is there is no way to do it with ftp in a simple or straightforward way. ftp was designed as an interactive program and hence is simply not built with your purpose in mind. It may be possible - with finite, but probably pretty high amount of work to put in - to script a solution around ftp, but i wouldn't suggest doing that.

What you can do, though, is to use r-commands (rcp) or their securized counterparts (scp, ...). Look at the manpages of rcp and/or scp and decide for yourself if they fit your purpose.

Another way is to create a tar-file of the subtree and use ftp to transfer it from one machine to another, then use tar to extract it there. While this is a simple and straightforward solution it needs some (depending on the amount of data you want to transfer) and maybe even a lot of disk space. Roughly the size of the tar archive is as big as the single files summed up (check with du to get a picture, if you want to transfer one subtree /transfer/this then issue

du -ks /transfer/this

to get the number of kbytes. The same number you will need again for the tar archive.

bakunin

The common wget commandline download tool has a recursive option. It can handle HTTP and FTP.

Why don't you use rsync it has all the functionality what you are looking for.