Re: FTP to MS ftp server

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 2:42 PM, Guido Van Hoecke <guivho@gmail.com> wrote:

> It is regrettable that the ftp directory listing of MS ftp servers often
> use the MS-DOS directory listing format rather than the standard unix
> format.

What is regrettable is that the FTP protocol did not *have* a standard
listing format until it was too late. At the time FTP was invented
(RFC 765, published in 1980), no one had thought that 30 years later
people will want to access FTP servers with any client programs other
than Telnet and the interactive command-line FTP client.

The LIST command in the protocol is not required to adhere to any
particular format; it is meant for human user consumption and it is
expected that users will be able to read any reasonable format. RFC
3659, published in 2007, adds the MLSD command which does specify a
machine-readable format.

The questions, then, are: whether the server you are interested in
does in fact implement RFC 3659, and whether Emacs can use MLSD
instead of LIST in order to fetch listings.

You might also see if you can migrate to a different protocol, such as
SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol, not Simple File Transfer Protocol;
unlikely on a Windows server), or WebDAV, or god-forbid CIFS (also
sometimes known as SMB), all of which are better suited for file
collection browsing than FTP.