Recursive ftp with wget
July 29, 2006 Posted by Al Castle
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Categories: OSX, Puter Stuff
When I need to transfer files via a network , I’m using a terminal and ssh, or rsync - with ssh. Recently I had to migrate a website from a third party server that offered no shell access and no ssh, all I had to work with was an ftp login.
While I understand you can use some sort of GUI for the OS of choice, but I mean seriously, who still uses ftp? I suppose there’s hosting companies that make use of it, relics from the early days of personal websites. I wasn’t going to find and download some graphical ftp client for this.
The next thing I came to realize is that there was no command for a recursive mget. Err. I wasn’t going to create the directories locally, change remote directory and do a mget zillion times.
I finally remember wget, which supports several protocols and has a plethora of useful flags, including recursive ftp. Alas my OSX laptop does not include wget, which is another blog rant in itself.
The command you’d want to use is:
wget -r ftp://username:password@badhosting.com

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