Command line flags:¶

-u XX

Use username XX instead of anonymous.

-p XX

Use password XX with the username.

-P XX

Use port number XX instead of the default FTP service port (21).

-j XX

Use account XX in supplement to the username and password (deprecated).

-d XX

Use the file XX for debug logging.

-a

Use ASCII transfer type instead of binary.

-t XX

Timeout after XX seconds.

-v/-V

Do (do not) use progress meters. The default is to use progress meters if the output stream is a TTY.

-f XX

Read the file XX for host, user, and password information.

-c

Read from remote host and write locally to standard out.

-C

Read from remote host and write locally to specified pathname.

-A

Append to local files, instead of overwriting them.

-z/-Z

Do (do not) try to resume transfers. The default is to try to resume (-z).

-E

Use regular (PORT) data connections.

-F

Use passive (PASV) data connections. The default is to use passive, but to fallback to regular if the passive connection fails or times out.

-DD

Delete remote file after successfully downloading it.

-R

Recursive mode; copy whole directory trees.

-T

Do not use automatic on-the-fly TAR mode for downloading whole directory trees. ncftpget uses TAR whenever possible since this usually preserves symbolic links and file permissions. TAR mode can also result in faster transfers for directories containing many small files, since a single data connection can be used rather than an FTP data connection for each small file. The downside to using TAR is that it forces downloading of the whole directory, even if you had previously downloaded a portion of it earlier, so you may want to use this option if you want to resume downloading of a directory.

-r XX

Redial a maximum of XX times until connected to the remote FTP server.

-b

Run in background (by submitting a batch job and then spawning ncftpbatch).

-bb

Similar to -b option, but only submits the batch job. You will need to run ncftpbatch for the batch job to be processed. This is useful if you already have a ncftpbatch process running, or wish to have better control of when batch jobs are processed.

For example, if you wanted to do background processing of three files all on the same remote server, it is more polite to use just one ncftpbatch process to process the three jobs sequentially, rather than having three ncftpbatch processes open three simultaneous FTP sessions to the same server.

-B XX

Try setting the TCP/IP socket buffer size to XX bytes.

-W XX

Send raw FTP command XX after logging in.

-X XX

Send raw FTP command XX after each file transferred.

-Y XX

Send raw FTP command XX before logging out.

The -W, -X, and -Y options are useful for advanced users who need to tweak behavior on some servers. For example, users accessing mainframes might need to send some special SITE commands to set blocksize and record format information.

For these options, you can use them multiple times each if you need to send multiple commands. For the -X option, you can use the cookie %s to expand into the name of the file that was transferred.

-o XX

Set advanced option XX.

This option is used primarily for debugging. It sets the value of an internal variable to an integer value. An example usage would be: -o useFEAT=0,useCLNT=1 which in this case, disables use of the FEAT command and enables the CLNT command. The available variables include: usePASV, useSIZE, useMDTM, useREST, useNLST_a, useNLST_d, useFEAT, useMLSD, useMLST, useCLNT, useHELP_SITE, useSITE_UTIME, STATfileParamWorks, NLSTfileParamWorks, require20, allowProxyForPORT, doNotGetStartCWD.