Net::FTP 1.19 review

Net::FTP is a FTP Client class

License: Perl Artistic License File size: 63K Developer: Graham Barr

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Net::FTP is a FTP Client class. Net::FTP is a class implementing a simple FTP client in Perl as described in RFC959. It provides wrappers for a subset of the RFC959 commands.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a way of transferring files between networked machines. The protocol defines a client (whose commands are provided by this module) and a server (not implemented in this module). Communication is always initiated by the client, and the server responds with a message and a status code (and sometimes with data).

The FTP protocol allows files to be sent to or fetched from the server. Each transfer involves a local file (on the client) and a remote file (on the server). In this module, the same file name will be used for both local and remote if only one is specified. This means that transferring remote file /path/to/file will try to put that file in /path/to/file locally, unless you specify a local file name.

The protocol also defines several standard translations which the file can undergo during transfer. These are ASCII, EBCDIC, binary, and byte. ASCII is the default type, and indicates that the sender of files will translate the ends of lines to a standard representation which the receiver will then translate back into their local representation.

EBCDIC indicates the file being transferred is in EBCDIC format. Binary (also known as image) format sends the data as a contiguous bit stream. Byte format transfers the data as bytes, the values of which remain the same regardless of differences in byte size between the two machines (in theory - in practice you should only use this if you really know what you're doing).

Installation:

In order to use this package you will need Perl version 5.002 or better. You install libnet, as you would install any perl module library, by running these commands:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

If you want to install a private copy of libnet in your home directory, then you should try to produce the initial Makefile with something like this command:

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=~/perl

The Makefile.PL program will start out by checking your perl installation for a few packages that are recommended to be installed together with libnet. These packages should be available on CPAN (described above).