I’m starting to get annoyed with the NcFTP FTP client. It’s got some raw commands only used by NcFTP products that are not included in the FTP RFC. The specific command that I’m taking issue with is ‘CLNT’. From what I gather by google researching, the command first appeared in NcFTPd and NcFTP[Get|Put] and only a few (thankfully) ftp daemons have implemented it.

As far as I can tell, there’s no way to disable the sending of the ‘CLNT’ command in NcFTP (while there is a way to do so in NcFTP[Get|Put]). That, along with the fact that you can’t get any support from NcFTP, is pretty damned frustrating if you ask me.

My question is this: hasn’t anyone made a better command-line ftp client yet? As far as I know, NcFTP has been the defacto *nix FTP client for the everyday user. So far tonight I’ve tried YAFC and cmdftp in my quest to find a better FTP client. At first try, neither of those two worked the way I wanted them to.

These are the things that I need my command-line FTP client to be able to do:

  • Send/Get files recursively.
  • Accept a username in the form of “username@hostname:port” for connecting with tlswrap.
  • If previous feature is lacking, it needs to provide its own method of connecting to sites via TLSv1 or TLSv2 authentication. Auth SSL also a plus.
  • Must have bookmarking capabilities equal-to or better than NcFTP’s.
  • Easy way to drop to shell. (i.e. ‘!’)
  • REST. Needs to be able to resume files accurately.
  • Paged file listings for when the listing is longer than 24 lines.

These are the things that I’d like to see in a command-line ftp client but that I can get along fine without:

  • A file transfer queue.
  • FXP site-to-site transfers.
  • File filter list to filter out certain files that I never want to get/send (.debug and .message come to mind).

Does anyone know of any good clients that can do what I want? I can’t imagine NcFTP is the only client that people have used for the past 9+ years.