UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

I am the definition of UNIX newbie so please bare with me. I am wondering the best way to list all files on a ftp server.

If I use

curl -l ftp://user:password@ftp_server

This shows me the root of the ftp server, but I would like to get a listing of everything in the subfolders

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Dallas

Looking at my version of curl, recursive options is not introduced as feature, I guess you want to do something like "ls -lR", but I don't see that option.

That is exactly what I want to do, but I have no idea if there is anyway to do it. Like you say I can't find an argument in curl for this. I don't have to use curl. I think I could do it with a bash script for the FTP program. Catch is that I don't know how to write a bash script to do this.

how 'bout wget

I am hoping to do it without installing any additional software so I can run it as part of a larger application that can run on any OSX computer.

I found this through a web search but it gives me an error message.

I made a script with the following lines in it;

open 1.1.1.1 <- IP address for FTP Server
user myusername mypassword
ls -R
bye

then it is run from the command line with this command

ftp -inv /location/of/script &


but I get an error message that says

No address associated with nodename

If i type in these same commands through the FTP interface it works fine.

Does anyone know what the problem might be?
Thanks for your help
Dallas

I have a way to do it now, Thanks for the replies everyone.

I used the following bash script to get it to work.

#!/bin/bash
hostname="ftp://$1:$2@$3"
ftp $hostname << EOF
ls -1R
EOF

Thanks
Dallas

Dallasbr,

Thanks for posting your solution. That's a useful script to have.

If you want to add username/password and dump the list to a local file, you might consider this:

#!/bin/bash
hostname="whateverHostName"
ftp -i -nv $hostname << EOF
user username password
lcd /path/to/local/dir
ls -1R ftpList.txt
EOF

Of course, since this has the username/password you need to have absolute control over this script. I use something similar to this for internal purposes at work. Also, remember it's possible to configure some ftp servers so that "ls -R" is disabled (like vsftpd).

Cheers...cassj