Often you will find information on the Internet that you don’t want to examine on a remote system: you want to have a copy of it yourself. You need to move a copy of the file to your local system so you can manipulate it there. The tool for doing this is ftp. In this paper I will discuss what ftp is, how to get started with ftp, anonymous ftp, and how to handle large and groups of files. Ftp is named after the application protocol it uses: the “File Transfer Protocol”(FTP). The protocol’s job is to move files from one computer to another.
It doesn’t matter where the two computers are located, how they are connected or whether or not they use the same operating system. Provided both computers can “talk” the ftp protocol and have access to the Internet. Ftp covers a broad range of databases and services. You can find anything from legal opinions, recipes and even free software. If you are a serious researcher, you will find ftp valuable; it is the “common language” for sharing data. Ftp is complex program because there are so many different ways to manipulate files and file structures.
Different ways of storing files present complications and may require additional thought to get things right There are many different ftp clients out there on the web. The one I like to use is called CuteFTP. This is a powerful but easy-to-use FTP client. CuteFTP’s interface is extremely well suited to common FTP chores. Its three-pane design lets you change directories from the command line, eliminating a lot of mouse clicks. Its customizable toolbar offers almost every command you’ll ever use and allows you to hide the ones you don’t need. There is another client that is quite popular it is called WS_FTP.
It offers the crucial auto-resume, which lets you pick up a transfer where you left off if your connection has been interrupted. WS_FTP not only lets you specify ASCII, binary, or auto-detect as your default transfer mode, but it also lets you specify a different transfer mode for any file extension. And you can configure WS_FTP so that it automatically converts file extensions on the local or the remote machine to ensure that all of your file names are uniform (every htm file extension becomes html, for instance). Better yet, you can run WS_FTP Pro from the command line, which lets advanced users integrate file transfers into scripts.