#59 Downloading Files via FTP
One of the original killer apps of the Internet was file transfer, and the king of file transfer programs is ftp, the File Transfer Protocol. At some fundamental level, all Internet interaction is based upon file transfer, whether it's a web browser requesting an HTML document and its accompanying graphic files, a chat server relaying lines of discussion back and forth, or an email message traveling from one end of the earth to the other.
The original ftp program still lingers on, and while its interface is quite crude, it's powerful, capable, and well worth taking advantage of with some good scripts. There are plenty of newer ftp programs around, notably ncftp (see http://www.ncftp.org/), but with some shell ...
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