There are two computers involved in an ftp connection; The server, and the client. First, the client will connect to the server. Then the client will send the server commands, and the server will respond to them.

Let's say you wanted to make an ftp connection to our ftp server, ftp.cdrom.com

• - Go to Start / select Run
• - Type in "ftp" (without the quotes)

  Note: If you have Internet Explorer installed Windows may act goofy at this point, trying to complete the "ftp" you typed in with "ftp://". If this happens, just remove the "://".

This will run the ftp program for you. This will be displayed:

ftp>

Then you'll use the "open" command. The way to run this is "open server" Since you want to connect to our server, ftp.cdrom.com, you would type:

Your ftp client will connect to our ftp server. Then it will prompt you for a User name. Use the username "anonymous", and your email address as your password. After a successful login, the server will show you a welcoming message.

Now you can use the commands "ls" and "dir" to view the contents of the current directory you are in. "ls" simply lists the files, "dir" does the same with a more verbose output.

Other commands are:

help                   get help

close                  close the connection

quit                   quit ftp

ls                     list files

dir                    list files (more verbose)

get <remote-file>      download a file

mget <remote-files>    get multiple files

put <local-file>       upload a file

mput <local-files>     upload multiple files

cd <directory>         change directory

pwd                    print working directory

ascii                  set the file transfer type to ASCII

binary                 set the file transfer type to BINARY

If you wanted to transfer a text file (.txt), you would use the ascii transfer type. If you wanted to transfer a binary file (a .exe, or .zip, etc), you would use type binary.

The FTP client that comes with Windows95/NT is a text based program. There are more easier to use, Windows-based FTP clients out there, such as CuteFTP, and WS-FTP.

Christopher G. Mann - Webmaster, Walnut Creek CDROM