SIMPLEFTP(1)

✨ SIMPLEFTP(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to simpleftp — a genuinely tiny little FTP and HTTP(S) client that lives in the InterNetNews documentation family 🫶

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

simpleftp url [...]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So simpleftp is a Perl script — yes, Perl, she's vintage but she works — and she does one thing: fetch files in a batch-oriented fashion. Very "no thoughts, just downloads" energy 💅

You hand her one or more FTP or HTTP(S) URLs on the command line, and she retrieves the file(s) from the remote FTP or web server(s), dropping them in the current directory with the same basename as on the remote. Like, for example, https://downloads.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/active.gz gets stored as active.gz in the current directory. Slay, same name, no drama ✨

She's not confused by credentials either — she properly understands usernames, passwords and ports specified like this:

ftp://user:password@host:port/path/file

A few things to know about her personality 🎀:

• She has a hard-coded timeout of 30 seconds. Not 29, not 31, don't ask.
• She uses binary mode and passive mode for FTP data transfers. iconic behavior, honestly.
• She exits with status 0 on success. Otherwise, the exit status is the number of failed transfers — so if three things flop, you get 3. very "count your losses" of her 😭

Fun lil fact: INN only uses simpleftp when running actsyncd. If wget (or also ncftpget or ncftp for the sole scope of FTP) is found at configure time, then it'll be used instead of this script. so she's like, the understudy 🦋

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💀 BUGS 💀

ngl bestie, this is the section where I have to be real with you.

simpleftp is an extremely poor substitute for more complete programs like the freely available wget utility, which you are encouraged to use instead. like, actually encouraged. the manpage says so. 🫶

She was written only to provide elementary support in INN for non-interactive fetching of the files in https://downloads.isc.org/pub/pgpcontrol/ or https://downloads.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/ without requiring administrators to install yet another package. That's it. That's the whole assignment.

Her shortcomings as a general purpose program are too numerous to mention, but one that stands out is that downloaded files by simpleftp override existing files with the same name in the local directory. so yeah. she will absolutely steamroll your file. no cap. watch out 👀💀

Also, technical tea ☕:

• HTTP support requires the "HTTP::Tiny" Perl module, only installed in Perl 5.14.0 and above as a Perl core module.
• Besides, the "IO::Socket::SSL" and "Net::SSLeay" Perl modules are required for HTTPS support.
• In case they are not installed, simpleftp cannot handle these protocols. periodt. 🎀

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🌈 HISTORY 🌈

Tossed off by David C Lawrence <tale@isc.org> for InterNetNews. Rewritten to use "HTTP::Tiny" and "Net::FTP" by Julien Élie.

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

actsync(8) — go read it, bestie 💜

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mwah 💋 this has been SIMPLEFTP(1) from the InterNetNews crew — brought to you by INN 2.7.4, dated 2025-03-29. go forth and maybe just use wget fr fr 🦋✨