Windows XP in a Nutshell

Name

FTP — \windows\system32\ftp.exe

Synopsis

File Transfer Protocol; transfer files between two computers, typically across the Internet.

To Open

Command Prompt → ftp

Usage

ftp url
ftp [-v] [-d] [-i] [-n] [-g] [-s:filename] [-a] [-A] [-w:size] [host]

Description

FTP is used to transfer files to and from a remote computer, typically on the Internet. Like many Internet applications, FTP is a client application that requires a corresponding FTP server to work. When you start FTP, you are connecting to a remote host and then issuing commands to instruct the host to send or receive files, display directory listings, and so on.

Although each FTP session requires a username and password, there’s a very common workaround that allows anonymous connections. Typically, one enters anonymous as the username and an email address (or, frankly, any bogus text) as the password to log in (assuming anonymous access is allowed on the server at all).

Once you’ve logged in, commands are issued by typing in the prompt; the complete list of FTP commands is documented later in this section. The exception is when FTP is run in noninteractive mode using the url option.

Command-line parameters for FTP are as follows:

url

A web-style address ( URL) to a specific file located on an anonymous FTP server, which looks something like this:

ftp://server.com/path/file

If you specify a complete URL, FTP will download the file and then quit automatically, rather than going into interactive mode.

host

Specify the hostname ...