The actual command to use FTP will vary among operating systems; for
the sake of clarity, we'll use FTP here, since it's the most
general form.
There are two ways to connect to a system---using its hostname
or its Internet number. Using the hostname is usually preferred.
However, some sites aren't able to resolve hostnames properly,
and have no alternative. We'll assume you're able to use hostnames
for simplicity's sake. The form is
ftp somewhere.domain
Domains for help with reading and using domain names
(in the example below, somewhere.domain is ftp.uu.net).
You must first know the name of the system you want to connect to.
We'll use ftp.uu.net as an example. On your system, type:
ftp ftp.uu.net
(the actual syntax will vary depending on the type of system the
connection's being made from). It will pause momentarily then respond
with the message
Connected to ftp.uu.net.
and an initial prompt will appear:
220 uunet FTP server (Version 5.100 Mon Feb 11 17:13:28 EST 1991) ready.
Name (ftp.uu.net:jm):
to which you should respond with anonymous:
220 uunet FTP server (Version 5.100 Mon Feb 11 17:13:28 EST 1991) ready.
Name (ftp.uu.net:jm): anonymous
The system will then prompt you for a password; as noted previously, a
good response is your email address:
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
Password: jm@south.america.org
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp>
The password itself will not echo. This is to protect a user's
security when he or she is using a real account to FTP files between
machines. Once you reach the ftp> prompt, you know you're
logged in and ready to go.
Notice the ftp.uu.net:joe in the Name: prompt? That's
another clue that anonymous FTP is special: FTP expects a normal user
accounts to be used for transfers.
dir
At the ftp> prompt, you can type a number of commands to perform
various functions. One example is dir---it will list the files
in the current directory. Continuing the example from above:
ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
total 3116
drwxr-xr-x 2 7 21 512 Nov 21 1988 .forward
-rw-rw-r-- 1 7 11 0 Jun 23 1988 .hushlogin
drwxrwxr-x 2 0 21 512 Jun 4 1990 Census
drwxrwxr-x 2 0 120 512 Jan 8 09:36 ClariNet
... etc etc ...
-rw-rw-r-- 1 7 14 42390 May 20 02:24 newthisweek.Z
... etc etc ...
-rw-rw-r-- 1 7 14 2018887 May 21 01:01 uumap.tar.Z
drwxrwxr-x 2 7 6 1024 May 11 10:58 uunet-info
226 Transfer complete.
5414 bytes received in 1.1 seconds (4.9 Kbytes/s)
ftp>
The file newthisweek.Z was specifically included because we'll
be using it later. Just for general information, it happens to be a
listing of all of the files added to UUNET's archives during the past
week.
The directory shown is on a machine running the Unix operating
system---the dir command will produce different results on other
operating systems (e.g. TOPS, VMS, et al.). Learning to recognize
different formats will take some time. After a few weeks of
traversing the Internet, it proves easier to see, for example, how
large a file is on an operating system you're otherwise not acquainted
with.
With many FTP implementations, it's also possible to take the output
of dir and put it into a file on the local system with
ftp> dir n* outfilename
the contents of which can then be read outside of the live FTP
connection; this is particularly useful for systems with very long
directories (like ftp.uu.net). The above example would put the
names of every file that begins with an n into the local file
outfilename.
cd
At the beginning of an FTP session, the user is in a "top-level"
directory. Most things are in directories below it (e.g. /pub). To
change the current directory, one uses the cd command. To change to
the directory pub, for example, one would type
ftp> cd pub
which would elicit the response