I was just browsing an article about a guys frustration with command line ftp options and I wanted to leave him a comment but couldn’t so I ‘m posting here for anyone interested.

There is a free library full of great and useful *nix commands for windows that are all just freestanding executables. You download the library, plop the library in your path, and bam! you can do all sorts of cool stuff such as the other guys request to do recursive ftp downloads from the command line (using wget).

wget -r ftp://user:password@host/path/to/directory/to/download

You don’t have to provide the username and password if you are connecting to an anonymous ftp resource. wget is also useful for copying an entire website down to your local machine.

The entire library is very easy to use and well documented. I have been using this library for years and it is fantastic. I miss it when I don’t have it available. Overall it is a great “compromise” between having cygwin or nothing at all so if you need some handy command line tools I suggest you check it out.

Comments

uxintro

I know this is a bit late, but this is a great tip.

I just used it to download my entire web page to a new server. Made use of my SSH connection and the two web host’s fat pipe, rather than uploading from smy computer!

Thanks. This is one is going straight to del.icio.us.