TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols

Chapter 27. FTP: File Transfer Protocol

Introduction

FTP is another commonly used application. It is the Internet standard for file transfer. We must be careful to differentiate between file transfer, which is what FTP provides, and file access, which is provided by applications such as NFS (Sun's Network File System, Chapter 29). The file transfer provided by FTP copies a complete file from one system to another system. To use FTP we need an account to login to on the server, or we need to use it with a server that allows anonymous FTP (which we show an example of in this chapter).

Like Telnet, FTP was designed from the start to work between different hosts, running different operating systems, using different file structures, and perhaps different ...