Help with mput command

I need the proper syntax to ftp a whole directory in *nix using "mput"

[hussra]

lcd sourceFolderName
cd destinationFolderName
binary
mput *

Or am I missing something?

[hussra]

Oh yes, and

prompt

to toggle on and off the prompt before each file is transferred. Apparently on some systems this command is "toggle prompt".

I got that far. I can't get it to resend into the subdirectories. I've tried -R, but I guess I'm not putting it in the right place.

[hussra]

Looks like there is no such option in regular ftp. If you have the disk space, your best bet is probably to tar and gzip the whole lot up and ftp that single file.

tar -z -cf /wherever/backup.tgz /some/directory/to/backup

then transfer backup.tgz

I found this:

The mget (multiple get) command retrieves multiple files from a remote system with just one request. It interprets asterisks as wildcards and prompts you for a yes or no response for each file. It has no recursive features, meaning that although you can use mget to copy all the files in a given directory (mget *), you cannot use mget to get all the files in a given directory and all directories beneath it. You must use mget for each directory, one at a time.

I'm going to try a different ftp interface.

Originally Posted by hussra

Looks like there is no such option in regular ftp. If you have the disk space, your best bet is probably to tar and gzip the whole lot up and ftp that single file.

tar -z -cf /wherever/backup.tgz /some/directory/to/backup

then transfer backup.tgz

I thought of that too, but there's another problem with that. The MXC files are so big that I would have to make multiple tar files because of the tar file size limit. PAIN!!

GRRRRR.... When trying to just move the contents of a directory I'm getting "arguments too long"

Does anyone know of another way to ftp files from one IP to another? I know I've used a different method in the past, but I just can't remember what it was.

[waynehoskins]

There's a tar filesize limit? I know of the PKZIP two-gig cliff, but nothing in tar.

Try this:
tar -cvzf archive_name.tar.gz foo
(which it occurs to me is the same as the other one .. but I've used tar to make 12-gig archives before .. so it should work).
Or if you need deeper compression and can afford the extra time, pipe it through bzip2 instead of gzip:
tar -cvjf archive_name.tar.bz2 foo

Being the tape archiver, tar handles large files and large archives well.

[waynehoskins]

You're thinking of scp, which uses ssh?

[hussra]

If you have ssh rather than ftp access to the other box, rsync is your man but I can't remember the command-line args just now and need to head home. Something like

rsync -avz -e ssh /directory/to/backup :/backup/destination/directory/

[waynehoskins]

And with scp (secure copy), it's

scp files_to_backup user@host:remotepath