Net::FTP - FTP Client class
- use Net::FTP;
- $ftp = Net::FTP->new("some.host.name", Debug => 0)
- or die "Cannot connect to some.host.name: $@";
- $ftp->login("anonymous",'-anonymous@')
- or die "Cannot login ", $ftp->message;
- $ftp->cwd("/pub")
- or die "Cannot change working directory ", $ftp->message;
- $ftp->get("that.file")
- or die "get failed ", $ftp->message;
- $ftp->quit;
Net::FTP
is a class implementing a simple FTP client in Perl as
described in RFC959. It provides wrappers for a subset of the RFC959
commands.
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a way of transferring files between networked machines. The protocol defines a client (whose commands are provided by this module) and a server (not implemented in this module). Communication is always initiated by the client, and the server responds with a message and a status code (and sometimes with data).
The FTP protocol allows files to be sent to or fetched from the
server. Each transfer involves a local file (on the client) and a
remote file (on the server). In this module, the same file name
will be used for both local and remote if only one is specified. This
means that transferring remote file /path/to/file will try to put
that file in /path/to/file locally, unless you specify a local file
name.
The protocol also defines several standard translations which the file can undergo during transfer. These are ASCII, EBCDIC, binary, and byte. ASCII is the default type, and indicates that the sender of files will translate the ends of lines to a standard representation which the receiver will then translate back into their local representation. EBCDIC indicates the file being transferred is in EBCDIC format. Binary (also known as image) format sends the data as a contiguous bit stream. Byte format transfers the data as bytes, the values of which remain the same regardless of differences in byte size between the two machines (in theory - in practice you should only use this if you really know what you're doing).
This is the constructor for a new Net::FTP object. HOST
is the
name of the remote host to which an FTP connection is required.
HOST
is optional. If HOST
is not given then it may instead be
passed as the Host
option described below.
OPTIONS
are passed in a hash like fashion, using key and value pairs.
Possible options are:
Host - FTP host to connect to. It may be a single scalar, as defined for
the PeerAddr
option in IO::Socket::INET, or a reference to
an array with hosts to try in turn. The host method will return the value
which was used to connect to the host.
Firewall - The name of a machine which acts as an FTP firewall. This can be
overridden by an environment variable FTP_FIREWALL
. If specified, and the
given host cannot be directly connected to, then the
connection is made to the firewall machine and the string @hostname
is
appended to the login identifier. This kind of setup is also referred to
as an ftp proxy.
FirewallType - The type of firewall running on the machine indicated by
Firewall. This can be overridden by an environment variable
FTP_FIREWALL_TYPE
. For a list of permissible types, see the description of
ftp_firewall_type in Net::Config.
BlockSize - This is the block size that Net::FTP will use when doing transfers. (defaults to 10240)
Port - The port number to connect to on the remote machine for the FTP connection
Timeout - Set a timeout value (defaults to 120)
Debug - debug level (see the debug method in Net::Cmd)
Passive - If set to a non-zero value then all data transfers will
be done using passive mode. If set to zero then data transfers will be
done using active mode. If the machine is connected to the Internet
directly, both passive and active mode should work equally well.
Behind most firewall and NAT configurations passive mode has a better
chance of working. However, in some rare firewall configurations,
active mode actually works when passive mode doesn't. Some really old
FTP servers might not implement passive transfers. If not specified,
then the transfer mode is set by the environment variable
FTP_PASSIVE
or if that one is not set by the settings done by the
libnetcfg utility. If none of these apply then passive mode is
used.
Hash - If given a reference to a file handle (e.g., \*STDERR
),
print hash marks (#) on that filehandle every 1024 bytes. This
simply invokes the hash()
method for you, so that hash marks
are displayed for all transfers. You can, of course, call hash()
explicitly whenever you'd like.
LocalAddr - Local address to use for all socket connections, this argument will be passed to IO::Socket::INET
If the constructor fails undef will be returned and an error message will be in $@
Unless otherwise stated all methods return either a true or false value, with true meaning that the operation was a success. When a method states that it returns a value, failure will be returned as undef or an empty list.
Log into the remote FTP server with the given login information. If
no arguments are given then the Net::FTP
uses the Net::Netrc
package to lookup the login information for the connected host.
If no information is found then a login of anonymous is used.
If no password is given and the login is anonymous then anonymous@
will be used for password.
If the connection is via a firewall then the authorize
method will
be called with no arguments.
This is a protocol used by some firewall ftp proxies. It is used
to authorise the user to send data out. If both arguments are not specified
then authorize
uses Net::Netrc
to do a lookup.
Send a SITE command to the remote server and wait for a response.
Returns most significant digit of the response code.
Transfer file in ASCII. CRLF translation will be done if required
Transfer file in binary mode. No transformation will be done.
Hint: If both server and client machines use the same line ending for text files, then it will be faster to transfer all files in binary mode.
Rename a file on the remote FTP server from OLDNAME
to NEWNAME
. This
is done by sending the RNFR and RNTO commands.
Send a request to the server to delete FILENAME
.
Attempt to change directory to the directory given in $dir
. If
$dir
is ".."
, the FTP CDUP
command is used to attempt to
move up one directory. If no directory is given then an attempt is made
to change the directory to the root directory.
Change directory to the parent of the current directory.
Returns the full pathname of the current directory.
Set the byte offset at which to begin the next data transfer. Net::FTP simply records this value and uses it when during the next data transfer. For this reason this method will not return an error, but setting it may cause a subsequent data transfer to fail.
Remove the directory with the name DIR
. If RECURSE
is true then
rmdir will attempt to delete everything inside the directory.
Create a new directory with the name DIR
. If RECURSE
is true then
mkdir will attempt to create all the directories in the given path.
Returns the full pathname to the new directory.
The alloc command allows you to give the ftp server a hint about the size
of the file about to be transferred using the ALLO ftp command. Some storage
systems use this to make intelligent decisions about how to store the file.
The SIZE
argument represents the size of the file in bytes. The
RECORD_SIZE
argument indicates a maximum record or page size for files
sent with a record or page structure.
The size of the file will be determined, and sent to the server automatically for normal files so that this method need only be called if you are transferring data from a socket, named pipe, or other stream not associated with a normal file.
Get a directory listing of DIR
, or the current directory.
In an array context, returns a list of lines returned from the server. In a scalar context, returns a reference to a list.
Get a directory listing of DIR
, or the current directory in long format.
In an array context, returns a list of lines returned from the server. In a scalar context, returns a reference to a list.
Get REMOTE_FILE
from the server and store locally. LOCAL_FILE
may be
a filename or a filehandle. If not specified, the file will be stored in
the current directory with the same leafname as the remote file.
If WHERE
is given then the first WHERE
bytes of the file will
not be transferred, and the remaining bytes will be appended to
the local file if it already exists.
Returns LOCAL_FILE
, or the generated local file name if LOCAL_FILE
is not given. If an error was encountered undef is returned.
Put a file on the remote server. LOCAL_FILE
may be a name or a filehandle.
If LOCAL_FILE
is a filehandle then REMOTE_FILE
must be specified. If
REMOTE_FILE
is not specified then the file will be stored in the current
directory with the same leafname as LOCAL_FILE
.
Returns REMOTE_FILE
, or the generated remote filename if REMOTE_FILE
is not given.
NOTE: If for some reason the transfer does not complete and an error is returned then the contents that had been transferred will not be remove automatically.
Same as put but uses the STOU
command.
Returns the name of the file on the server.
Same as put but appends to the file on the remote server.
Returns REMOTE_FILE
, or the generated remote filename if REMOTE_FILE
is not given.
Returns the name of the last file stored on the server using the
STOU
command.
Returns the modification time of the given file
Returns the size in bytes for the given file as stored on the remote server.
NOTE: The size reported is the size of the stored file on the remote server. If the file is subsequently transferred from the server in ASCII mode and the remote server and local machine have different ideas about "End Of Line" then the size of file on the local machine after transfer may be different.
Returns TRUE if the remote server supports the given command.
Called without parameters, or with the first argument false, hash marks are suppressed. If the first argument is true but not a reference to a file handle glob, then \*STDERR is used. The second argument is the number of bytes per hash mark printed, and defaults to 1024. In all cases the return value is a reference to an array of two: the filehandle glob reference and the bytes per hash mark.
Determine if the server supports the specified feature. The return value is a list of lines the server responded with to describe the options that it supports for the given feature. If the feature is unsupported then the empty list is returned.
- if ($ftp->feature( 'MDTM' )) {
- # Do something
- }
- if (grep { /\bTLS\b/ } $ftp->feature('AUTH')) {
- # Server supports TLS
- }
The following methods can return different results depending on
how they are called. If the user explicitly calls either
of the pasv
or port
methods then these methods will
return a true or false value. If the user does not
call either of these methods then the result will be a
reference to a Net::FTP::dataconn
based object.
Send an NLST
command to the server, with an optional parameter.
Same as nlst
but using the LIST
command
Begin the retrieval of a file called FILE
from the remote server.
Tell the server that you wish to store a file. FILE
is the
name of the new file that should be created.
Same as stor
but using the STOU
command. The name of the unique
file which was created on the server will be available via the unique_name
method after the data connection has been closed.
Tell the server that we want to append some data to the end of a file
called FILE
. If this file does not exist then create it.
If for some reason you want to have complete control over the data connection,
this includes generating it and calling the response
method when required,
then the user can use these methods to do so.
However calling these methods only affects the use of the methods above that
can return a data connection. They have no effect on methods get
, put
,
put_unique
and those that do not require data connections.
Send a PORT
command to the server. If PORT
is specified then it is sent
to the server. If not, then a listen socket is created and the correct information
sent to the server.
Tell the server to go into passive mode. Returns the text that represents the
port on which the server is listening, this text is in a suitable form to
sent to another ftp server using the port
method.
The following methods can be used to transfer files between two remote servers, providing that these two servers can connect directly to each other.
This method will do a file transfer between two remote ftp servers. If
DEST_FILE
is omitted then the leaf name of SRC_FILE
will be used.
Like pasv_xfer
but the file is stored on the remote server using
the STOU command.
This method can be used to wait for a transfer to complete between a passive
server and a non-passive server. The method should be called on the passive
server with the Net::FTP
object for the non-passive server passed as an
argument.
Abort the current data transfer.
Send the QUIT command to the remote FTP server and close the socket connection.
Net::FTP
inherits from Net::Cmd
so methods defined in Net::Cmd
may
be used to send commands to the remote FTP server.
Send a command, that Net::FTP does not directly support, to the remote server and wait for a response.
Returns most significant digit of the response code.
WARNING This call should only be used on commands that do not require data connections. Misuse of this method can hang the connection.
Some of the methods defined in Net::FTP
return an object which will
be derived from this class.The dataconn class itself is derived from
the IO::Socket::INET
class, so any normal IO operations can be performed.
However the following methods are defined in the dataconn class and IO should
be performed using these.
Read SIZE
bytes of data from the server and place it into BUFFER
, also
performing any <CRLF> translation necessary. TIMEOUT
is optional, if not
given, the timeout value from the command connection will be used.
Returns the number of bytes read before any <CRLF> translation.
Write SIZE
bytes of data from BUFFER
to the server, also
performing any <CRLF> translation necessary. TIMEOUT
is optional, if not
given, the timeout value from the command connection will be used.
Returns the number of bytes written before any <CRLF> translation.
Returns the number of bytes read so far.
Abort the current data transfer.
Close the data connection and get a response from the FTP server. Returns true if the connection was closed successfully and the first digit of the response from the server was a '2'.
The following RFC959 commands have not been implemented:
Mount a different file system structure without changing login or accounting information.
Ask the server for "helpful information" (that's what the RFC says) on the commands it accepts.
Specifies transfer mode (stream, block or compressed) for file to be transferred.
Request remote server system identification.
Request remote server status.
Specifies file structure for file to be transferred.
Reinitialize the connection, flushing all I/O and account information.
When reporting bugs/problems please include as much information as possible. It may be difficult for me to reproduce the problem as almost every setup is different.
A small script which yields the problem will probably be of help. It would
also be useful if this script was run with the extra options Debug =
1>
passed to the constructor, and the output sent with the bug report. If you
cannot include a small script then please include a Debug trace from a
run of your program which does yield the problem.
Graham Barr <gbarr@pobox.com>
ftp(1), ftpd(8), RFC 959 http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc959.html
For an example of the use of Net::FTP see
autoftp
is a program that can retrieve, send, or list files via
the FTP protocol in a non-interactive manner.
Henry Gabryjelski <henryg@WPI.EDU> - for the suggestion of creating directories recursively.
Nathan Torkington <gnat@frii.com> - for some input on the documentation.
Roderick Schertler <roderick@gate.net> - for various inputs
Copyright (c) 1995-2004 Graham Barr. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.