How to sync over FTP

Don't re-invent the wheel.

1) Install rsync instead, which is designed with syncing in mind.

2) ftpsync was written a decade ago. Perhaps it has been updated since.

3) lftp syncs over FTP and is being actively maintained.

4) Perl package turbo-ftp-sync may also fit the bill.

Move directory on FTP server

without downloading and re-uploading:

rnfr source_dir
rnto target_dir

Good FTP clients

• WinSCP (Windows)
• WS FTP LE (Windows)
• FileZilla (Windows, Linux)
• FireFTP (Windows, Linux)

Developing over FTP

Using Eclipse and RSE plugin:

• Logs in okay
• But seems to always be closing directory sub-trees I've opened in 'Remote Systems' panel
• It wants to do an 'ls' on every parent directory in the hierarchy, every time I change files. Very slow.

Using CurlFtpFS:

• Install in Ubuntu from the software centre
• to mount: curlftpfs -v username:password@server.example.com local_dir/
• to unmount: fusermount -u local_dir/
• Performance is unusably slow... Eclipse wants to know about every single file on the remote server, not just the ones I'm editing.
• Saving the file through Eclipse using CurlFtpFS takes even longer than it would to upload it separately.

Using FileZilla and gedit:

• Browsing is fast
• Editing is fast
• But you have to navigate to every file manually each session, it doesn't remember what you had open
• The system of holding temp files locally is not ideal, but FileZilla detects changes in them very nicely
• You still can't grep over the files as they're all held remotely, and it's a bit fiddly to navigate to a specific file

Editing locally with Eclipse, and uploading after changes are made:

• Write an Ant script to upload any modified files?
• ...to investigate

Automate an FTP script

in the ftp script put.pl:
#!/bin/bash
HOST="example.com"
HOMEDIR="/"
ftp -i $HOST <<-EOF
passive
cd $HOMEDIR
put $1
quit
EOF
echo "I put the file "$1

in ~/.netrc:

machine example.com
    login [username]
    password [password]

to run:
put.pl [filename]

FTP client for Linux and Mac

Filezilla is brilliant, and extremely fast.

Edit text files on remote linux servers

UNTESTED:

> I've never managed to figure out how to rig up editors to edit
> files on remote servers.

On the server, put this in smb.conf

[homes]
comment = Home Directories
hide dot files = yes
read only = No
browseable = yes


Then in the finder/windows explorer connect to 'smb://hostname/' . Then make an alias to it on your desktop.

Alternatively, TextWrangler on the Mac has an ftp/sftp browser.

http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/

Beware of backslashes in login strings

using URI to parse an ftp connection string like:

ftp://domain\user:pass@host/path

...can lead to problems.
The backslash is not a legal URI character, so $uri->user may bring back just the domain!