C.3 Poking Around

Okay, we're in. ftp> is our prompt, and the ftp program is waiting for commands. There are a few basic commands you need to know about. First, the commands

ls

and

dir

both give file listings (where is an optional argument specifying a particular filename to list). The difference is that ls usually gives a short listing and dir gives a longer listing (that is, with more information on the sizes of the files, dates of modification, and so on).

The command

cd

will move to the given directory (just like the cd command on UNIX or MS-DOS systems). You can use the command

cdup

to change to the parent directory.

The command

help

will give help on the given ftp (such as ls or cd). If no command is specified, ftp will list all of the available commands.

If we type dir at this point we'll see an initial directory listing of where we are.

ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
total 1337

dr-xr-xr-x  2 root     wheel         512 Aug 13 13:55 bin 
drwxr-xr-x  2 root     wheel         512 Aug 13 13:58 dev 
drwxr-xr-x  2 root     wheel         512 Jan 25 17:35 etc 
drwxr-xr-x 19 root     wheel        1024 Jan 27 21:39 pub 
drwxrwx-wx  4 root     ftp-admi     1024 Feb  6 22:10 uploads 
drwxr-xr-x  3 root     wheel         512 Mar 11  1992 usr

Each of these entries is a directory, not an individual file which we can download (specified by the d in the first column of the listing). On most FTP archive sites, the publicly available software is under the directory /pub, so let's go there.

ftp> cd pub
ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful.
150 ASCII data connection for /bin/ls (128.84.181.1,4525) (0 bytes).
total 846

-rw-r--r--   1 root     staff        1433 Jul 12  1988 README 
-r--r--r--   1 3807     staff       15586 May 13  1991 US-DOMAIN.TXT.2 
-rw-r--r--   1 539      staff       52664 Feb 20  1991 altenergy.avail 
-r--r--r--   1 65534    65534       56456 Dec 17  1990 ataxx.tar.Z 
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other     2013041 Jul  3  1991 gesyps.tar.Z 
-rw-r--r--   1 432      staff       41831 Jan 30  1989 gnexe.arc 
-rw-rw-rw-   1 615      staff       50315 Apr 16  1992 linpack.tar.Z 
-r--r--r--   1 root     wheel       12168 Dec 25  1990 localtime.o 
-rw-r--r--   1 root     staff        7035 Aug 27  1986 manualslist.tblms 
drwxr-xr-x   2 2195     staff         512 Mar 10 00:48 mdw 
-rw-r--r--   1 root     staff        5593 Jul 19  1988 t.out.h

Here we can see a number of (interesting?) files, one of which is called README, which we should download (most FTP sites have a README file in the /pub directory).