[WEB4LIB] Re: FTP Client

[Richard Wiggins]

LOL, the FTP client included with Windows is a DOS mode tool, and of course
it's character mode -- the way all original Internet apps were.  If Unix had
gone graphical before Internet apps were invented, we might have a standard
graphical Internet client suite. :-)

Actually, Microsoft thinks IE is your graphical FTP client.  They actually
have built pretty decent FTP client functionality into Internet Explorer
5.5.  You can connect to anonymous servers and download files, or log into
servers for which you have an ID/PW and either upload or download files. 
Your view of the remote list of files is the familiar Windows Explorer view;
you can adjust from Folder to List view, turn on/off Details, etc.

It's a little non-intuitive in some ways.  To download from a remote FTP
server, you right-click on the desired file or folder, and select Copy to
Folder, which allows you to browse to the desired local spot.  I would
prefer to be able to also click/copy/paste.  And I haven't figured out how
to force ASCII versus Binary, though a test case of downloading a ZIP file
from a Unix host showed it was downloaded in binary mode.

There are a couple of good third party alternatives -- WS-FTP LE and WS-FTP
Pro, and FTP Explorer are pretty good Windows clients. And Office 2000 has
Web folders which can under the covers be FTP sites. The IE functionality is
at least worth a try.

/rich


On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Tami-Jo M. Eckley wrote:

> Supposedly Windows 98 (and other versions) comes with an FTP Client - how
do I access this?

Start-button => Run => FTP

...but it isn't pretty. It's a character-mode application, similar to Unix's
ftp.

--
Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
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Richard Wiggins
Consulting, Writing & Training on Internet Topics
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