FTP isn’t exactly cutting-edge technology. These days, if you control both ends of a connection, you’re probably using scp, SFTP, rsync, or something even fancier. But FTP refuses to die, especially if you are perusing old public FTP servers or talking to retrocomputers. Every now and then, you still need an FTP client. Naturally, there are plenty of graphical clients. But some of us would rather stay at the command line. You could just type ftp, of course. It works, and if you haven’t used it lately, it is probably better than you remember. However, I’ve long been a fan of NcFTP. While some other FTP clients have caught up, it still has unique features that make FTP a lot more productive.
Not Your Father’s FTP
Before maligning the standard ftp command, though, we should point out that it probably isn’t the FTP client you remember from 30 years ago. For example, on openSUSE Tumbleweed, /usr/bin/ftp is really tnftp, a portable version of NetBSD’s enhanced FTP client. Debian uses it too; the ftp package in both Bookworm and Trixie leads you to tnftp. Since current Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian Trixie, you’ll encounter tnftp there, too. That’s significant because tnftp has already fixed many of the irritations you might associate with old-fashioned FTP.
You get command-line editing, history, and filename completion, things that are also in ncftp. Both understand passive FTP and IPv6. The tnftp client can also retrieve HTTP, HTTPS, and file: URLs, so commands such as:
ftp https://example.com/something.tar.gz
aren’t necessarily typos, although ncftp lacks this ability. But ncftp does have some killer features.
Remember Me?
One of NcFTP’s nicest creature comforts is bookmarks. Connect to a machine, move to a useful directory, and save it:
ncftp /pub/micros> bookmark oldstuff
Then later you can simply type:
ncftp oldstuff
The bookmark can remember more than just the hostname, making frequently used FTP sites feel much more like named resources than anonymous servers you repeatedly have to navigate.
NcFTP also maintains a cache of remote directory listings. If you’ve ever used FTP over a slow link, you know how annoying it is to ask for the same directory listing over and over. NcFTP can often work from what it already knows instead. Neither feature sounds earth-shattering, but together they make an interactive FTP session considerably more pleasant.
Get All The Things
Another difference becomes obvious when you want an entire directory. NcFTP supports recursive transfers:
get -R foo
or:
put -R foo
That seems obvious if you’re accustomed to modern tools, but traditional FTP is fundamentally organized around transferring individual files. NcFTP does the tedious directory walking for you. It also handles resuming interrupted transfers more naturally, something particularly welcome when the file in question is a multi-gigabyte disk image rather than README.TXT. With tnftp, you have to explicitly ask to resume an interrupted file. NcFTP will detect it and, depending on configuration, either resume or, at least, offer to resume the transfer.
Go Away, I’m Busy
NcFTP also has a clever background-transfer system. Commands such as:
bgget giant-file.iso
Hand a transfer to NcFTP’s spooler rather than tying up your interactive session. There are corresponding facilities for uploads. That’s an interesting distinction from simply detaching a shell command. NcFTP knows that this is a transfer job and maintains a queue of FTP work that can be retried and processed independently.
Shell Games
But perhaps the biggest reason to know about NcFTP is that NcFTP isn’t just one program. The package includes commands such as ncftpget, ncftpput, and ncftpls. These perform FTP operations directly from the Unix shell without starting an interactive FTP command interpreter. For example:
ncftpget ftp.example.com /tmp /pub/widget.bin
or:
ncftpput ftp.example.com /incoming widget.bin
This is much nicer in a script than sending commands to ftp using, for example, a here document and automating login with .netrc. For example:
ftp <<EOF
open ftp.example.com
cd incoming
put widget.bin
quit
EOF
Sure, it works, but any time you send input to an interactive program it is, at best, messy. The ncftpput program expresses what you actually wanted to do in the first place: put this file there. That’s much more Unix-like.
Don’t Do This At Home
None of these conveniences change FTP’s fundamental problem: ordinary FTP is not secure. Usernames, passwords, and data can travel without encryption. If you’re designing a new system and control both ends, you usually have much better choices. But sometimes you don’t control both ends. If FTP is something you run into, ncftp is worth knowing about. Bookmarks, cached directories, recursive and background transfers, and especially the script-friendly companion commands turn an antique protocol into something that feels surprisingly at home on a modern Unix command line.
Of course, just as you can use FUSE to mount an ssh server, you can use ftpfs, to make a remote server look like part of your file system. You never know when FTP is going to crop up.
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