NcFTP 3.2.0 review
DownloadThe purpose of ncftp is to provide a powerful and flexible interface to the Internet standard File Transfer Protocol.
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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 usability, 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 editing, 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) and ncftpput(1) 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.
What's New:
Fixed problem where ncftpbatch may requeue downloads when the local file was the same as the remote file.
ncftpls has been enhanced so that using the new -m option will have it try a machine-readable list command. These commands need to be implemented on the remote server for it to work.
ncftpls can now try to attempt to filter the files with a wildcard with the new -i option. For this option to work, this functionality must be properly implemented in the FTP server software.
ncftpls can also now behave similar to /usr/bin/find, with the new -g option. When invoked with -gg, it appends a slash to directory pathnames so you can distinguish files from directories.
Fixed a problem with ASCII translation where a CR+LF may not have been converted to the local text EOLN format if the CR+LF was split over an internal block boundary. The ASCII translation code has been rewritten so it is also more tolerant of malformatted text, such as CR+CR+LF end-of-lines.
You can now edit remote files, thanks to . The new "edit" command downloads to a temporary file, runs your $EDITOR, and uploads any changes back to the remote server. Naturally this requires both read and write permission on the remote server.
Handling "~" in paths a little better. Try to expand it to the remote home directory for remote commands, and the local home directory for local commands.
Progress meters now output to stderr. This eliminates a problem when using ncftpput with "-c" mode, which would result in a corrupted file.
More careful about trimming the $HOME/.ncftp/log file so it does not get too small.
You can now resume uploads when uploading into a temporary file (e.g. ncftpput's -S and -T options for using a temporary suffix or prefix).
The utility programs' "-X" option has been enhanced so it will automatically translate some /usr/bin/ftp commands into the raw RFC 959 FTP protcool commands that are required for this feature.
Fixes for Cygwin.
Some fixes for largefile support on Windows.
You can now resume transfers in ASCII mode, rather than just binary.
Fixed a problem with recursive uploads for Windows.
Opening a site with a bookmark no longer assumes that the server's software has the same configuration (i.e. if it did not support SIZE before, it now checks for SIZE each time rather than assuming each time the site is opened that the server does not support SIZE).
You can now use an empty password if your user account does not have a password.
Fixed a problem in the "ls" implementation for international month names.
Fixed a bug where Type of Service socket options were being set with IPPROTO_TCP instead of IPPROTO_IP.
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