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How do I download a whole folder through FTP in Terminal?

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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

mget is the closest you can get with the included FTP binary. You have to mkdir and cd/lcd and then get all the files than match a pattern like *

The prompt toggle may come in handy.

FTP works within a directory, not on directories as containers of files. If you absolutely had to get the job done and ftp was the only tool you could use - you could cobble together an expect script to drive ftp for you.

Thankfully there are alternatives like scp|rsync|wget to get whole directories worth of files.

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Ok...so the bottom line is that I can't download a whole folder at one time; I have to download the individual files, right? – daviesgeek Jul 22 '11 at 15:23
Yup. Everyone wouldn't be showing wget, sftp, scp and rsync if ftp were up to the task. – bmike♦ Jul 22 '11 at 15:41
Thanks...does SFTP allow folder downloading? – daviesgeek Jul 22 '11 at 16:07
Oops (sorry) - no. sftp is the same syntax and limitations of ftp - just securing the connection using ssh instead of ftp authentication. – bmike♦ Jul 22 '11 at 16:47
Ok...thank you very much!! – daviesgeek Jul 22 '11 at 17:17
up vote 2 down vote

Another way is to use curl 

curl ftp://ftp.com/mp3/* --user login:password -o /myfolder/*

I think this is working, or file by file 

curl ftp://ftp.com/mp3/mymusic.zip --user login:password -o mymusic.zip

I hope this helped.

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OK, thank you very much, but is there a way via FTP to do this? – daviesgeek Jul 21 '11 at 23:28
Awesome! I was unaware of curl's FTP proclivity. Thanks! – bmike♦ Jul 22 '11 at 1:24
Yeah...neither was I. I'll probably use it more often. – daviesgeek Jul 22 '11 at 15:24
up vote 2 down vote

Use scp (documentation) or sftp (documentation)

scp -r mylocaldirectory login@myserverip:/remote/directory/path/
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That's not what I'm asking. My question is: How do I download a folder via FTP in Terminal? In other words, what commands in FTP do I use to download a folder? – daviesgeek Jul 21 '11 at 21:58
1  
sftp is far superior to FTP +1 – bmike♦ Jul 22 '11 at 1:23

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