tells <I>ncftp</I> to immediately start the background transfers you've requested,
which simply runs a copy of the <I>ncftpbatch</I> program which is responsible
for the background jobs. Normally the program will start the background
job as soon as you close the current site, open a new site, or quit the
program. The reason for this is because since so many users still use slow
dialup links that starting the transfers would slow things to a crawl,
making it difficult to browse the remote system. An added bonus of starting
the background job when you close the site is that <I>ncftp</I> can pass off that
open connection to the <I>ncftpbatch</I> program. That is nice when the site is
always busy, so that the background job doesn't have to wait and get re-logged
on to do its job. </DD>
<DT> </DT>
</DL>
<pre>binary</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Sets the transfer type to raw binary, so that
no translation is done on the data transferred. This is the default anyway,
since most files are in binary. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>bookmark</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Saves the current session settings
for later use. This is useful to save the remote system and remote working
directory so you can quickly resume where you left off some other time.
The bookmark data is stored in your <I>$HOME/.ncftp/bookmarks</I> file. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>bookmarks</pre>
<DL>
<DD>
Lists the contents of your <I>$HOME/.ncftp/bookmarks</I> file in a human-readable
format. You can use this command to recall the bookmark name of a previously
saved bookmark, so that you can use the <I>open</I> command with it. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>cat</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Acts
like the ``/bin/cat'' <I>UNIX</I> command, only for remote files. This downloads the
file you specify and dumps it directly to the screen. You will probably
find the <I>page</I> command more useful, since that lets you view the file one
screen at a time instead of printing the entire file at once. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>cd</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Changes
the working directory on the remote host. Use this command to move to different
areas on the remote server. If you just opened a new site, you might be
in the root directory. Perhaps there was a directory called ``/pub/news/comp.sources.d''
that someone told you about. From the root directory, you could:</DD>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>cd pub
cd news
cd comp.sources.d</pre>
</UL>
</UL>
<DL>
<UL>
<DT> or, more concisely, </DT>
</UL>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>cd /pub/news/comp.sources.d</pre>
</UL>
</UL>
<DL>
<UL>
</UL>
<DD> Then, commands such as <I>get</I>, <I>put</I>, and <I>ls</I> could
be used to refer to items in that directory. Some shells in the <I>UNIX</I> environment
have a feature I like, which is switching to the previous directory. Like
those shells, you can do:</DD>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>cd -</pre>
</UL>
<p> to change to the last directory you were in.</p>
</UL>
<pre> </pre>
<pre>chmod</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Acts like the
``/bin/chmod'' <I>UNIX</I> command, only for remote files. However, this is not a standard
command, so remote FTP servers may not support it. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>close</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Disconnects you
from the remote server. The program does this for you automatically when
needed, so you can simply open other sites or quit the program without
worrying about closing the connection by hand. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>debug</pre>
<DL>
<DD> This command is mostly
for internal testing. You could type</DD>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>debug 1</pre>
</UL>
</UL>
<DL>
<UL>
</UL>
<DD> to turn debugging mode on. Then you could see all messages between
the program and the remote server, and things that are only printed in
debugging mode. However, this information is also available in the <I>$HOME/.ncftp/trace</I>
file, which is created each time you run <I>ncftp</I>. If you need to report a
bug, send a <I>trace</I> file if you can. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>dir</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Prints a detailed directory listing.
It tries to behave like <I>UNIX</I>'s ``/bin/ls -l'' command. If the remote server seems
to be a <I>UNIX</I> host, you can also use the same flags you would with <I>ls</I>, for
instance</DD>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>dir -rt</pre>
</UL>
</UL>
<DL>
<UL>
<DT> would try to act like </DT>
</UL>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>/bin/ls -lrt</pre>
</UL>
<p>would on <i>UNIX</i>.</p>
<p> </p>
</UL>
</DL>
<pre>edit</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Downloads into a temporary file for editing on the local host,
then uploads the changed file back to the remote host. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>get</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Copies files from the current working
directory on the remote host to your machine's current working directory.
To place a copy of ``README'' and ``README.too'' in your local directory, you could
try:</DD>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<p> get README README.too</p>
</UL>
</UL>
<DL>
<UL>
<DT> You could also accomplish that by using a wildcard
expression, such as: </DT>
</UL>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>get README*</pre>
</UL>
</UL>
<DL>
<DD> This command is similar to the behavior of other FTP programs' <I>mget</I> command. To retrieve a remote file but give it a different name on
your host, you can use the ``-z'' flag. This example shows how to download a
file called <I>ReadMe.txt</I> but name it locally as <I>README</I>:</DD>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>get -z ReadMe.txt README</pre>
</UL>
</UL>
<DL>
<DD> The program tries to ``resume'' downloads by default. This means that if the remote FTP server lost the connection and was only
able to send 490 kilobytes of a 500 kilobyte file, you could reconnect
to the FTP server and do another <I>get</I> on the same file name and it would
get the last 10 kilobytes, instead of retrieving the entire file again.
There are some occasions where you may not want that behavior. To turn it
off you can use the ``-f'' flag. </DD>
<DT> </DT>
<DD>There are also times where you want to append
to an existing file. You can do this by using the ``-A'' flag, for example</DD>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>get -A log.11</pre>
</UL>
</UL>
<DL>
<UL>
</UL>
<ul><P>would append to a file named ``log.11'' if it existed locally.
<p>Another thing you can do is delete a remote file after you download it.
This can be useful when a remote host expects a file to be removed when
it has been retrieved. Use the double-D flag, such as ``get -DD'' to do this. </ul>
<DT>
</DT>
<DD>The <I>get</I> command lets you retrieve entire directory trees, too. Although it may
not work with some remote systems, you can try ``get -R'' with a directory to
download the directory and its contents. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
<DD>When using the ``-R'' flag, you can also use the ``-T'' flag to disable
automatic on-the-fly TAR mode for downloading whole directory trees.
The program 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. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>jobs</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Views the list of currently
executing <I>NcFTP</I> background tasks. This actually just runs <I>ncftpbatch</I> -l
for you. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>lcd</pre>
<DL>
<DD> The <I>lcd</I> command is the first of a few ``l'' commands that work
with the local host. This changes the current working directory on the local
host. If you want to download files into a different local directory, you
could use <I>lcd</I> to change to that directory and then do your downloads. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>lchmod</pre>
<DL>
<DD>
Runs ``/bin/chmod'' on the local host. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<pre>lls</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Another local command that comes
in handy is the <I>lls</I> command, which runs ``/bin/ls'' on the local host and displays
the results in the program's window. You can use the same flags with <I>lls</I>
as you would in your command shell, so you can do things like:</DD>
</DL>
<UL>
<UL>
<pre>lcd ~/doclls -lrt p*.txt</pre>
<pre> </pre>
</UL>
</UL>
<pre>lmkdir</pre>
<DL>
<DD> Runs ``/bin/mkdir'' on the local host. </DD>
<dt> </dt>
</DL>
<tt>lookup</tt>
<UL>
<P>The program also has a built-in interface to the name service via the <I>lookup</I>
command. This means you can lookup entries for remote hosts, like:</P>
