Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 11/17/20 2:53 PM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:

>> I personally find that unfortunate, but support in browser clients is 
>> not an indicator of FTP's utility either.   One reason to use FTP is 
>> that browser clients are really poor tools for some kinds of file 
>> transfer, especially if you want to transfer multiple files with 
>> minimum human interaction.
>
> I find wget a great tool as well.  I have used it on sites with 
> multiple documents that do not support other mechanisms.  I have 
> scripts running wget for some of these.  I just see rsnyc as a more 
> efficient use of resources than a script running wget(s).

I use wget on occasion.  But it doesn't let me browse a file system, 
interactively list files, etc.   Nor does it let me mount an FTP server 
as a file system.   wget works well in some kinds of scripts, as does 
curl, but it's not exactly easy to use.

(I'm pretty sure you know this.   But some people seem to be saying "you 
don't need ftp, you can use this other tool for scripting" when the 
underlying protocol doesn't support the features that the particular 
application needs, and the applications using FTP aren't always scripts 
calling a separate program.)

Keith