# ncftp(1) - man - phpMan [ncftp(1)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/ncftp/1/markdown) General Commands Manual [ncftp(1)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/ncftp/1/markdown) ## 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'll find that _ncftp_ has a wealth of valuable performance and usage features. The program was designed with an emphasis on us‐ ability, and it does as much as it can for you automatically so you can do what you expect to do with a file transfer program, which is transfer files between two interconnected systems. Some of the cooler features include progress meters, filename completion, command-line edit‐ ing, background processing, auto-resume downloads, bookmarking, cached directory listings, host redialing, working with firewalls and proxies, downloading entire directory trees, etc., etc. The _ncftp_ distribution comes with the useful utility programs [_ncftpget_(1)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/ncftpget/1/markdown) and [_ncftpput_(1)](https://www.chedong.com/phpMan.php/man/ncftpput/1/markdown) 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 on the command line. This is a synonym for running _ncftp_ and then using the _open_ command. A few command-line flags are al‐ lowed with this mode: ### -u ### -p ### -j ### -P **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 the _University_ _of_ _Nebraska_. Using the symbolic name is the preferred 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 permission. The _FTP_ _Protocol_'s authenti‐ cation system is very similar to that of logging in to your account. You have to give an ac‐ count name, and its password for access to that account's files. However, most remote sys‐ tems 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 sys‐ tem by default. What actually happens is that the program tries to use ``anonymous'' as the account name, and when prompted for a password, uses your 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 connected 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 current remote directory, you can use the program's _ls_ and _dir_ commands. 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 directories 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: 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 FTP session's settings for later. You can use the _bookmark_ command to save an entry into your $HOME/.ncftp/bookmarks file. When you use the _bookmark_ command, you also specify a bookmark name, so the next time instead of open‐ ing 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 concept of text files differs between operating systems. For example on UNIX, a text file denotes line breaks with 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 can use _ascii_ to ensure that both the remote system and local system translate accord‐ ingly. The default transfer 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 the background. Normally when you do a _get_ then the program does the download immediately, and does not return control to you until the download com‐ pletes. The background transfers are nice because you can continue browsing the re‐ mote filesystem and even open other systems. In fact, they are done by a daemon process, so even if you log off your UNIX host the daemon should still do your trans‐ fers. The daemon will also automatically continue to retry the transfers until they finish. To tell when background jobs have finished, you have 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 schedule when to do the transfers. They take a ``-@'' parameter, whose argument is a date of the form YYYYMMDDhhmmss (four digit year, month, day, hour, minute, second). For example, to schedule a down‐ load at 3 AM on November 6, you could try: bgget -@ 19971106030000 /pub/idstuff/quake/q2_100.zip bgstart This command tells _ncftp_ to immediately start the background transfers you've re‐ quested, which simply runs a copy 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 the remote system. An added bonus of starting the background job when you close the site is that _ncftp_ can pass off that open connection to the _ncftpbatch_ program. That is nice when the site is always busy, so that the background job doesn't have to wait and get re-logged on to do its job. binary Sets the transfer type to raw binary, so that no translation is done on the data transferred. This is the default anyway, since most files are in binary. 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 _$HOME/.ncftp/bookmarks_ file. bookmarks Lists the contents of your _$HOME/.ncftp/bookmarks_ file in a human-readable format. You can use this command to recall the bookmark name of a previously saved bookmark, 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 differ‐ ent 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 direc‐ tory. 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, 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 1 to turn debugging mode on. Then you could see all messages between the program and the remote server, and things that are only printed in debugging mode. However, 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 to behave 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 instance dir -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 the remote host to your machine's current working directory. 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: get README* This command is similar to the behavior of other FTP programs' _mget_ command. To re‐ trieve 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 connection and was only able to send 490 kilobytes of a 500 kilo‐ byte 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 can use the ``-f'' flag. There are also times where you want to append to an existing file. You can do this by using the ``-A'' flag, for example get -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 been retrieved. 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 remote systems, 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 downloading 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 downloading 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_ background tasks. 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 you want to download files into a different local directory, 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 can use the same flags with _lls_ as you would in your command shell, so you can do things like: lcd ~/doc lls -lrt p*.txt lmkdir Runs ``/bin/mkdir'' on the local host. lookup The 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 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 lpage Views a local file one page at a time, with your preferred $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. It tries 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 instance ls -rt would try to act like /bin/ls -CFrt would on _UNIX_. _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 display instantly. 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 next listing 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 many public archives, you won't have the proper access permissions 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 when you 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 pls These commands are equivalent to _dir_ and _ls_ respectively, 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, 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 re‐ motely 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 after you 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 re‐ mote systems, so you can try ``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 dis‐ played 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_). quote This can be used to send a direct _FTP_ _Protocol_ command to the remote server. Gener‐ ally 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 [ path-name ] 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 whole 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 to remove a non-empty directory, so be careful. set This lets you configure some program variables, which are saved between runs in the _$HOME/.ncftp/prefs_ file. The basic syntax is: set