FTP
FTP, the File Transfer Protocol, is probably the oldest network protocol that curl supports—it was created in the early 1970s. The official spec that still is the go-to documentation is RFC 959, from 1985, published well over a decade before the first curl release.
FTP was created in a different era of the Internet and computers and as such it works a little bit differently than most other protocols. These differences can often be ignored and things will just work, but they are also important to know at times when things do not run as planned.
The FTP protocol is a command and response
protocol; the client sends a command and the
server responds. If you use curl's -v
option you will get to see all the commands
and responses during a transfer.
For an ordinary transfer, there are something like 5 to 8 commands necessary to send and as many responses to wait for and read. Perhaps needlessly to say, if the server is in a remote location there will be a lot of time waiting for the ping pong to go through before the actual file transfer can be set up and get started. For small files, the initial commands can take longer time than the actual data transfer.
When an FTP client is about to transfer data, it specifies to the server which "transfer mode" it would like the upcoming transfer to use. The two transfer modes curl supports are 'ASCII' and 'BINARY'. Ascii is for text and usually means that the server will send the files with converted newlines while binary means sending the data unaltered and assuming the file is not text.
curl will default to binary transfer mode
for FTP, and you ask for ascii mode instead
with -B, --use-ascii
or by making sure the URL ends with ;type=A.
FTP is one of the protocols you normally do
not access without a user name and password.
It just happens that for systems that allow
"anonymous" FTP access you can
login with pretty much any name and password
you like. When curl is used on an FTP URL to
do transfer without any given user name or
password, it uses the name anonymous
with the password [email protected].
If you want to provide another user name
and password, you can pass them on to curl
either with the -u, --user
option or embed the info in the URL:
curl --user daniel:secret ftp://example.com/download
curl ftp://daniel:[email protected]/download
