Re: Alternative to WINSCP

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.