path: root/lib/inets/doc/src/ftp_client.xml

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<chapter>
  <header>
    <copyright>
      <year>2004</year><year>2013</year>
      <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder>
    </copyright>
    <legalnotice>
      Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
      you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
      You may obtain a copy of the License at
 
          http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

      Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
      distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
      WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
      See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
      limitations under the License.
    
    </legalnotice>

    <title>FTP Client</title>
    <prepared>Ingela Anderton Andin</prepared>
    <responsible></responsible>
    <docno></docno>
    <approved></approved>
    <checked></checked>
    <date></date>
    <rev></rev>
    <file>ftp_client.xml</file>
  </header>

  <section>
    <title>Getting Started</title>

    <p>FTP clients are considered to be rather temporary. Thus, 
      they are only started and stopped during runtime and cannot 
      be started at application startup.
      The FTP client API is designed to allow some functions to 
      return intermediate results. This implies that only the process
      that started the FTP client can access it with
      preserved sane semantics. (This can be solved
      by changing the API, using the concept of a controlling
      process as with other OTP applications, but
      that is something for future releases of <c>Inets</c>.) 
      If the process that started the FTP session 
      dies, the FTP client process terminates.</p>

    <p>The client supports IPv6 as long as the underlying mechanisms
      also do so.</p>

    <p>The following is a simple example of an FTP session, where
      the user <c>guest</c> with password <c>password</c> logs on to
      the remote host <c>erlang.org</c>:</p>
    <code type="erl"><![CDATA[
      1> inets:start().
      ok
      2> {ok, Pid} = inets:start(ftpc, [{host, "erlang.org"}]).
      {ok,<0.22.0>}
      3> ftp:user(Pid, "guest", "password").
      ok
      4> ftp:pwd(Pid).
      {ok, "/home/guest"}
      5> ftp:cd(Pid, "appl/examples").
      ok
      6> ftp:lpwd(Pid).
      {ok, "/home/fred"}.
      7> ftp:lcd(Pid, "/home/eproj/examples").
      ok
      8> ftp:recv(Pid, "appl.erl").
      ok
      9> inets:stop(ftpc, Pid).
      ok
    ]]></code>
    <p> The file
      <c>appl.erl</c> is transferred from the remote to the local
      host.  When the session is opened, the current directory at
      the remote host is <c>/home/guest</c>, and <c>/home/fred</c>
      at the local host. Before transferring the file, the current
      local directory is changed to <c>/home/eproj/examples</c>, and
      the remote directory is set to
      <c>/home/guest/appl/examples</c>.</p>
  </section>
</chapter>