SIMPLEFTP(1)

NAME
simpleftp - Rudimentary FTP client

SYNOPSIS
simpleftp url [...]

DESCRIPTION
simpleftp is a Perl script script that provides basic support for fetching files with FTP in a batch oriented fashion. It takes one or more FTP URLS on the command line. The file(s) will be retrieved from the remote server and placed in the current directory with the same basename as on the remote; e.g., "ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/active.gz" is stored as active.gz in the current directory.

BUGS
simpleftp is an extremely poor substitute for more complete programs like the freely available wget or ncftp utilities. It was written only to provide elementary support in INN for non-interactive fetching of the files in <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/> without requiring administrators to install yet another package. Its shortcomings as a general purpose program are too numerous to mention, but one that stands out is that simpleftp does not understand the complete syntax of URLs, only the hostname and pathname parts -- it will not understand username, password, port or parameter strings.

The Perl libraries that it uses have the advantage of coming with Perl, even older versions of Perl, but are not "-w" safe and do not work nearly as well as Net::FTP.

HISTORY
Tossed off by David C Lawrence <tale@isc.org> for InterNetNews.

$Id: simpleftp.1,v 1.3 2003/04/03 00:54:02 rra Exp $

SEE ALSO
actsync(8)