CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxftp
Roy
Roy

Reputation: 309

FTP command to List only directories. Impossible?

How do I perform directory listing but only display directories?

I tried ls | grep '/' but it got rejected with the error : usage: ls remote-directory local-file

This is because command line in FTP is different than your usual linux command line, but I was wondering if there is something equivalent in FTP command

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 7

Views: 14938

Answers (2)

MutantTurkey
MutantTurkey

Reputation: 536

using just ftp itself can be an issue, but if you pipe the output to a shell you'll have less of an issue.

 ftp -i myhost.com/yolo/ <<< "ls -1R all_files_list.txt"

we can see each listng in that file contains the file permissions signature like "-rwxrwxrw". a little bit of looking and you'll se that all directories start with 'd'

so

grep '^d' all_files_list.txt > only_directories_list.txt

Upvotes: 0

mweerden
mweerden

Reputation: 14051

The FTP protocol does not directly support such a feature. It does, however, allow for a broad interpretation that some servers use to accept things like using ls-style arguments (e.g. LIST -d, as mentioned by bdk).

Without such a broad interpretation by the server, you are left with retrieving this information from the listing. Unfortunately the standard doesn't provide a fixed format for this either (although it seems most servers use the ls -l formatting).

Upvotes: 7

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