How cool is that? And a jobs command is available to list running jobs. You can then bring it back into the foreground with fg. To move a running job into the background, just use ^z. With lftp, you can launch commands in parallel by putting them in the background much as we do on the Unix/Linux command line using & and you can group commands within parentheses and run the whole group in background. My first impression was that it's a solid tool and performs very well. Non-fatal errors are ignored and operations restarted as needed. The command also has a great handle on reliability. And it can download an entire website if you do a recursive get with the tool's mirror command. It also supports many access methods including FTP, HTTP, FISH, SFTP, HTTPS and FTPS.
So exactly what is lftp and why it is so much worth using and understanding?įor one thing, lftp doesn't just support ftp. Using lftp from a Unix command line was one of the choices presented to me going forward. Yes, lftp has a lot of interesting features and just got shoved in front of my face when a vendor I deal with changed their download options to be more secure. But lftp is hardly new (it initially showed up in 1996, but wasn't called lftp until 1997) and its flexibility takes it way beyond what anyone would expect of an ftp program. Maybe simply because no one brought this tool to my attention - until now. Maybe because I pretty much stopped using ftp commands years ago in favor of scp. I might have suggested "limber ftp", "lithe ftp", even "liberal ftp", but someone decided that the "l" could stand for "sophisticated", so who am I to question their logic?Ī more important question is "How has it escaped my attention until now?".
Some sites - and even the man page - claim that "lftp" stands for "sophisticated file transfer program", but I'm still struggling with that one.
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