Linux Fu: Improving FTP

FTP is ancient history, but it stubbornly persists—especially on old public servers and vintage systems. Per Hackaday, the standard ftp command on modern distributions is actually tnftp, which has picked up modern conveniences like command-line editing, history, and IPv6 support. For interactive work, though, NcFTP adds some clever features: bookmarks that save favorite locations, directory caching to avoid slow repeated listings, recursive transfers for entire folders, and a background spooler to queue transfers independently. The package also includes command-line companions like ncftpget and ncftpput, which make FTP much cleaner in shell scripts than the old approach of piping commands to an interactive session.

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