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Rob,

The FTP standard does not in any way explain how the UI of FTP is to work, it only explains the underlying network protocol.   The original FTP clients were written by Unix programmers (like almost everything related to TCP/IP) and they chose to accept 'ls' as the command to list files, because that's what Unix folks use at the command line.

The FTP standard does not even *mention* the ability to pass options to 'ls'.   It says the argument will "normally be a pathname", and that's pretty much all it says.  So you can have arguments (aka parameter) to the list command (ls, dir, whatever you want to call it) and it's "normally" a path, but it doesn't say it can't be anything else.  So the early implementations tended just call the underlying Unix ls command, and pass the options to that command unchanged.

But there is absolutely NOTHING in the standards that say that these options even exist, much less which ones are supported. Likewise, it doesn't even say that the commands should be called 'ls' or 'dir'.  All of that is up to whomever is writing the FTP software.

You could write your own where the command is called WRKOBJ if you wanted.  Or a GUI where it's a button you click rather than a command you type.

With regards to the output of the commands (which, I know, isn't what this topic was about, but I can't resist bringing it up...) the standard says says "Since the information on a file may vary widely from system to system, this information may be hard to use automatically in a program, but may be quite useful to a human user."  In other words, there is absolutely no standard to what the format of the ls output should be, it can be anything.

Its not clear what "standard sites" you're referring to, but I bet its the manual for the Unix ls command rather than the standard for FTP.

-SK


On 10/30/2018 7:26 AM, Rob Berendt wrote:
What makes me think it would? Well, any of the standard sites or man
pages one would research to find the options on the ls command show
various options. That is what makes me think so.




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