User Commands ncftp(1)
NAME
ncftp - Browser program for the File Transfer Protocol
SYNOPSIS
ncftp [host]
ncftp [ftp://host.name/directory/]
DESCRIPTION
The purpose of ncftp is to provide a powerful and flexible
interface to the Internet standard File Transfer Protocol. It is intended to replace the stock ftp program that comes with the system. Although the program appears to be rather spartan, you'llfind that ncftp has a wealth of valuable performance and
usage features. The program was designed with an emphasison usability, and it does as much as it can for you automat-
ically so you can do what you expect to do with a filetransfer program, which is transfer files between two inter-
connected systems. Some of the cooler features include progress meters,filename completion, command-line editing, background pro-
cessing, auto-resume downloads, bookmarking, cached direc-
tory listings, host redialing, working with firewalls and proxies, downloading entire directory trees, etc., etc.The ncftp distribution comes with the useful utility pro-
grams ncftpget(1) and ncftpput(1) which were designed to do
command-line FTP. In particular, they are very handy for
shell scripts. This version of ncftp no longer does
command-line FTP, since the main ncftp program is more of a
browser-type program.
OPTIONS The program allows you to specify a host or directory URL onthe command line. This is a synonym for running ncftp and
then using the open command. A few command-line flags are
allowed with this mode:-u XX Use username XX instead of anonymous.
-p XX Use password XX with the username.
-j XX Use account XX in supplement to the username and
password (deprecated).-P XX Use port number XX instead of the default FTP ser-
vice port (21).ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 1
User Commands ncftp(1)
INTRODUCTION TO THE COMMAND SHELL Upon running the program you are presented a command prompt where you type commands to the program's shell. Usually you will want to open a remote filesystem to transfer files to and from your local machine's filesystem. To do that, you need to know the symbolic name of the remote system, or its Internet Protocol (IP) address. For example, a symbolic name might be ``typhoon.unl.edu,'' and its IP address could be ``129.93.33.24.'' To open a connection to that system, you use the program's open command: open typhoon.unl.edu open 129.93.33.24 Both of these try to open the machine called typhoon at theUniversity of Nebraska. Using the symbolic name is the pre-
ferred way, because IP addresses may change without notice, while the symbolic names usually stay the same.When you open a remote filesystem, you need to have permis-
sion. The FTP Protocol's authentication system is very similar to that of logging in to your account. You have to give an account name, and its password for access to that account's files. However, most remote systems that have anything you might be interested in don't require an account name for use. You can often get anonymous access to a remote filesystem and exchange files that have been made publicly accessible. The program attempts to get anonymous permission to a remote system by default. What actually happens is that the program tries to use ``anonymous'' as the account name, and when prompted for a password, usesyour E-mail address as a courtesy to the remote system's
maintainer. You can have the program try to use a specific account also. That will be explained later.After the open command completes successfully, you are con-
nected to the remote system and logged in. You should now see the command prompt change to reflect the name of the current remote directory. To see what's in the currentremote directory, you can use the program's ls and dir com-
mands. The former is terse, preferring more remote files in less screen space, and the latter is more verbose, giving detailed information about each item in the directory.You can use the program's cd command to move to other direc-
tories on the remote system. The cd command behaves very much like the command of the same name in the Bourne and Korn shell. The purpose of the program is to exchange data with other systems. You can use the program's get command to copy a file from the remote system to your local system:ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 2
User Commands ncftp(1)
get README.txt The program will display the progress of the transfer on the screen, so you can tell how much needs to be done before the transfer finishes. When the transfer does finish, then you can enter more commands to the program's command shell. You can use the program's put command to copy a file from your system to the remote system: put something.tar When you are finished using the remote system, you can open another one or use the quit Before quitting, you may want to save the current FTPsession's settings for later. You can use the bookmark com-
mand to save an entry into your $HOME/.ncftp/bookmarks file.
When you use the bookmark command, you also specify a book-
mark name, so the next time instead of opening the full hostname you can use the name of the bookmark. A bookmark acts just like one for your web browser, so it saves the remote directory you were in, the account name you used, etc., and other information it learned so that the next time you use the bookmark it should require as little effort from you as possible. COMMAND REFERENCE help The first command to know is help. If you just type help from the command shell, the program prints the names of all of the supported commands. From there, you can get specific help for a command by typing the command after, for example: help open prints information about the open command. ascii This command sets the transfer type to ASCII text.This is useful for text-only transfers because the con-
cept of text files differs between operating systems. For example on UNIX, a text file denotes line breakswith the linefeed character, while on MS-DOS a line
break is denoted by both a carriage return character and a line feed character. Therefore, for data transfers that you consider the data as text you canncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 3
User Commands ncftp(1)
use ascii to ensure that both the remote system and local system translate accordingly. The defaulttransfer type that ncftp uses is not ASCII, but
straight binary. bgget and bgput These commands correspond to the get and put commands explained below, except that they do the job in thebackground. Normally when you do a get then the pro-
gram does the download immediately, and does not returncontrol to you until the download completes. The back-
ground transfers are nice because you can continuebrowsing the remote filesystem and even open other sys-
tems. In fact, they are done by a daemon process, so even if you log off your UNIX host the daemon shouldstill do your transfers. The daemon will also automat-
ically continue to retry the transfers until they fin-
ish. To tell when background jobs have finished, youhave to examine the $HOME/.ncftp/spool/log file, or run
the jobs command from within NcFTP. Both the bgget and bgput commands allow you to schedulewhen to do the transfers. They take a ``-@'' parame-
ter, whose argument is a date of the form YYYYMMDDhhmmss (four digit year, month, day, hour, minute, second). For example, to schedule a download at 3 AM on November 6, you could try:bgget -@ 19971106030000 /pub/idstuff/quake/q2_100.zip
bgstartThis command tells ncftp to immediately start the back-
ground transfers you've requested, which simply runs acopy of the ncftpbatch program which is responsible for
the background jobs. Normally the program will start the background job as soon as you close the current site, open a new site, or quit the program. The reason for this is because since so many users still use slow dialup links that starting the transfers would slow things to a crawl, making it difficult to browse theremote system. An added bonus of starting the back-
ground job when you close the site is that ncftp can
pass off that open connection to the ncftpbatch pro-
gram. That is nice when the site is always busy, so that the background job doesn't have to wait and getre-logged on to do its job.
binarySets the transfer type to raw binary, so that no trans-
lation is done on the data transferred. This is the default anyway, since most files are in binary.ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 4
User Commands ncftp(1)
bookmark Saves the current session settings for later use. This is useful to save the remote system and remote working directory so you can quickly resume where you left off some other time. The bookmark data is stored in your$HOME/.ncftp/bookmarks file.
bookmarksLists the contents of your $HOME/.ncftp/bookmarks file
in a human-readable format. You can use this command
to recall the bookmark name of a previously saved book-
mark, so that you can use the open command with it. cat Acts like the ``/bin/cat'' UNIX command, only for remote files. This downloads the file you specify and dumps it directly to the screen. You will probably find the page command more useful, since that lets you view the file one screen at a time instead of printing the entire file at once. cd Changes the working directory on the remote host. Use this command to move to different areas on the remote server. If you just opened a new site, you might be in the root directory. Perhaps there was a directory called ``/pub/news/comp.sources.d'' that someone told you about. From the root directory, you could: cd pub cd news cd comp.sources.d or, more concisely, cd /pub/news/comp.sources.d Then, commands such as get, put, and ls could be used to refer to items in that directory. Some shells in the UNIX environment have a feature I like, which is switching to the previous directory. Like those shells, you can do:cd -
to change to the last directory you were in. chmod Acts like the ``/bin/chmod'' UNIX command, only for remote files. However, this is not a standard command,ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 5
User Commands ncftp(1)
so remote FTP servers may not support it. close Disconnects you from the remote server. The program does this for you automatically when needed, so you can simply open other sites or quit the program without worrying about closing the connection by hand. debug This command is mostly for internal testing. You could type debug 1to turn debugging mode on. Then you could see all mes-
sages between the program and the remote server, andthings that are only printed in debugging mode. How-
ever, this information is also available in the$HOME/.ncftp/trace file, which is created each time you
run ncftp. If you need to report a bug, send a trace
file if you can. dir Prints a detailed directory listing. It tries tobehave like UNIX's ``/bin/ls -l'' command. If the
remote server seems to be a UNIX host, you can also use the same flags you would with ls, for instancedir -rt
would try to act like/bin/ls -lrt
would on UNIX. edit Downloads into a temporary file for editing on the local host, then uploads the changed file back to the remote host. get Copies files from the current working directory on theremote host to your machine's current working direc-
tory. To place a copy of ``README'' and ``README.too'' in your local directory, you could try: get README README.too You could also accomplish that by using a wildcard expression, such as:ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 6
User Commands ncftp(1)
get README* This command is similar to the behavior of other FTP programs' mget command. To retrieve a remote file but give it a different name on your host, you can use the``-z'' flag. This example shows how to download a file
called ReadMe.txt but name it locally as README:get -z ReadMe.txt README
The program tries to ``resume'' downloads by default.This means that if the remote FTP server lost the con-
nection and was only able to send 490 kilobytes of a 500 kilobyte file, you could reconnect to the FTP server and do another get on the same file name and it would get the last 10 kilobytes, instead of retrieving the entire file again. There are some occasions where you may not want that behavior. To turn it off you canuse the ``-f'' flag.
There are also times where you want to append to anexisting file. You can do this by using the ``-A''
flag, for exampleget -A log.11
would append to a file named ``log.11'' if it existed locally. Another thing you can do is delete a remote file after you download it. This can be useful when a remote host expects a file to be removed when it has beenretrieved. Use the double-D flag, such as ``get -DD''
to do this. The get command lets you retrieve entire directory trees, too. Although it may not work with some remotesystems, you can try ``get -R'' with a directory to
download the directory and its contents.When using the ``-R'' flag, you can also use the ``-T''
flag to disable automatic on-the-fly TAR mode for down-
loading whole directory trees. The program uses TAR whenever possible since this usually preserves symbolic links and file permissions. TAR mode can also result in faster transfers for directories containing many small files, since a single data connection can be used rather than an FTP data connection for each small file. The downside to using TAR is that it forces downloadingncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 7
User Commands ncftp(1)
of the whole directory, even if you had previously downloaded a portion of it earlier, so you may want to use this option if you want to resume downloading of a directory. jobs Views the list of currently executing NcFTP backgroundtasks. This actually just runs ncftpbatch -l for you.
lcd The lcd command is the first of a few ``l'' commands that work with the local host. This changes the current working directory on the local host. If youwant to download files into a different local direc-
tory, you could use lcd to change to that directory and then do your downloads. lchmod Runs ``/bin/chmod'' on the local host. lls Another local command that comes in handy is the lls command, which runs ``/bin/ls'' on the local host and displays the results in the program's window. You canuse the same flags with lls as you would in your com-
mand shell, so you can do things like: lcd ~/doclls -lrt p*.txt
lmkdir Runs ``/bin/mkdir'' on the local host. lookupThe program also has a built-in interface to the name
service via the lookup command. This means you can lookup entries for remote hosts, like: lookup cse.unl.edu ftp.cs.unl.edu sphygmomanometer.unl.edu prints: cse.unl.edu 129.93.33.1 typhoon.unl.edu 129.93.33.24 sphygmomanometer.unl.edu 129.93.33.126 There is also a more detailed option, enabled with``-v,'' i.e.:
lookup -v cse.unl.edu ftp.cs.unl.edu
ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 8
User Commands ncftp(1)
prints: cse.unl.edu: Name: cse.unl.edu Address: 129.93.33.1 ftp.cs.unl.edu: Name: typhoon.unl.edu Alias: ftp.cs.unl.edu Address: 129.93.33.24 You can also give IP addresses, so this would work too: lookup 129.93.33.24 prints: typhoon.unl.edu 129.93.33.24 lpageViews a local file one page at a time, with your pre-
ferred $PAGER program.
lpwd Prints the current local directory. Use this command when you forget where you are on your local machine. lrename Runs ``/bin/mv'' on the local host. lrm Runs ``/bin/rm'' on the local host. lrmdir Runs ``/bin/rmdir'' on the local host. ls Prints a directory listing from the remote system. Ittries to behave like UNIX's ``/bin/ls -CF'' command.
If the remote server seems to be a UNIX host, you can also use the same flags you would with ls, for instancels -rt
would try to act like/bin/ls -CFrt
would on UNIX.ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 9
User Commands ncftp(1)
ncftp has a powerful built-in system for dealing with
directory listings. It tries to cache each one, so if you list the same directory, odds are it will displayinstantly. Behind the scenes, ncftp always tries a
long listing, and then reformats it as it needs to. So even if your first listing of a directory was a regular ``ls'' which displayed the files in columns, your nextlisting could be ``ls -lrt'' and ncftp would still use
the cached directory listing to quickly display the information for you! mkdir Creates a new directory on the remote host. For manypublic archives, you won't have the proper access per-
missions to do that. open Establishes an FTP control connection to a remote host.By default, ncftp logs in anonymously to the remote
host. You may want to use a specific user account whenyou log in, so you can use the ``-u'' flag to specify
which user. This example shows how to open the host ``bowser.nintendo.co.jp'' using the username ``mario:''open -u mario bowser.nintendo.co.jp
Here is a list of options available for use with the open command:-u XX Use username XX instead of anonymous.
-p XX Use password XX with the username.
-j XX Use account XX in supplement to the username and
password (deprecated).-P XX Use port number XX instead of the default FTP
service port (21). page Browses a remote file one page at a time, using your$PAGER program. This is useful for reading README's on
the remote host without downloading them first. pdir and plsThese commands are equivalent to dir and ls respec-
tively, only they feed their output to your pager. These commands are useful if the directory listing scrolls off your screen. put Copies files from the local host to the remote machine's current working directory. To place a copy of ``xx.zip'' and ``yy.zip'' in the remote directory,ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 10
User Commands ncftp(1)
you could try: put xx.zip yy.zip You could also accomplish that by using a wildcard expression, such as: put *.zip This command is similar to the behavior of other FTP programs' mput command. To send a remote file but give it a different name on your host, you can use the``-z'' flag. This example shows how to upload a file
called ``ncftpd-2.0.6.tar.gz'' but name it remotely as
``NFTPD206.TGZ:''put -z ncftpd-2.0.6.tar.gz NFTPD206.TGZ
The program does not try to ``resume'' uploads by default. If you do want to resume an upload, use the``-z'' flag.
There are also times where you want to append to an existing remote file. You can do this by using the``-A'' flag, for example
put -A log11.txt
would append to a file named ``log11.txt'' if it existed on the remote server. Another thing you can do is delete a local file afteryou upload it. Use the double-D flag, such as
``put -DD'' to do this.
The put command lets you send entire directory trees, too. It should work on all remote systems, so you cantry ``put -R'' with a directory to upload the directory
and its contents. pwd Prints the current remote working directory. A portion of the pathname is also displayed in the shell's prompt. quit Of course, when you finish using the program, type quit to end the program (You could also use bye, exit, or ^D).ncftp Last change: NcFTP Software 11
User Commands ncftp(1)
quote This can be used to send a direct FTP Protocol command to the remote server. Generally this isn't too useful to the average user. rename If you need to change the name of a remote file, you can use the rename command, like:rename SPHYGMTR.TAR sphygmomanometer-2.3.1.tar
rhelp Sends a help request to the remote server. The list of FTP Protocol commands is often printed, and sometimes some other information that is actually useful, like how to reach the site administrator. Depending on the remote server, you may be able to give a parameter to the server also, like: rhelp NLST One server responded:Syntax: NLST [
rm If you need to delete a remote file you can try the rm command. Much of the time this won't work because you won't have the proper access permissions. This command doesn't accept any flags, so you can't nuke a wholepath-name ] tree by using ``-rf'' flags like you can on UNIX.
rmdir Similarly, the rmdir command removes a directory. Depending on the remote server, you may be able toremove a non-empty directory, so be careful.
set This lets you configure some program variables, whichare saved between runs in the $HOME/.ncftp/prefs file.
The basic syntax is: set