This article originally appeared in TidBITS on 1994-01-17 at 12:00 p.m.
The permanent URL for this article is: http://db.tidbits.com/article/2263
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Administrivia

by Adam C. Engst

You may notice below that we have switched to using HTML (HyperText Markup Language) format for listing files at FTP sites. We are doing that as a slow progression toward making TidBITS more compatible with the World-Wide Web (WWW). The basic format is easy to figure out - a listing, called a URL or Universal Resource Locator, can look like one of these two possibilities (the difference being that the first one points at a file, whereas the second points at a directory):

ftp://host-name/directory-path/file-name
ftp://host-name/directory-path/

If you use NCSA Mosaic heavily, you can easily copy that line, switch to Mosaic, from the File menu choose Open URL, and paste the URL into the dialog box to retrieve the file via Mosaic. Of course, it might be easier to use the information in Fetch or TurboGopher or just plain Unix FTP.