Re: Good Debian/Linux FTP Client program ???
On Thursday 19 April 2007 02:54, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> If your server side requirement is not limited to ftp, I would suggest
> you investigate rsync [1] and unison-gtk [2]. These are special tools
> for *synchronizing* files and directories across networks, while ftp is
> focused on simply *transfering* files.
>
> rsync is command line and 'perfect' for synchronizing data from A to B
> or vice versa. Instead of you having to look for all the changed files,
> the program will look for all files that are different at A and B and
> only transfer those parts of files that are different, saving bandwidth.
> It is very fast on synchronizing a 200 GB partition of mine to its
> backup over the network. At the same time it is more secure than ftp,
> since it uses ssh for encrypting the transfer.
>
> unison-gtk is a gui application that will look at both directory trees
> and detect and transfer all files that have to be synchronized from A to
> B or vice versa. It is extremely fast at finding all the files that
> differ on my 40GB laptop partition from those on my workstation and
> synchronize all those that were changed on the workstation to the laptop
> and vice versa without me having to remember that I edited document A at
> the workstation, but document B has the current version on the laptop. I
> also use it to synchronize our web pages, so people can connect from
> more than one machine and don't have to worry about accidentally
> replacing the more recent copy of a file on the server with their older
> one from the last synchronisation. ;-)
>
> NB: unison (without gtk) can be used via the command line as well, but
> from your previous post, I gathered that you might prefer a gui.
>
> HTH,
>
> Johannes
>
> [1] http://rsync.samba.org/
> [2] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
I will definitely looked into these two because that is exactly what I am
looking for. I have been so impressed with samba since moving to Linux that I
think that rsync will be my next try.
I don't really have a preference for GUI or CLI as long as they can be
configured on a per-site basis so that I don't have to spend a lot of time
typing or clicking. I am perfectly happy with a CLI that can take it's input
from a script so that I can do something like;
<cmd> -f <ScriptFileName>
This is preferable to a poorly designed GUI program that would take say 5
dialog boxs and several mouse clicks to do the same thing.
lftp will do this from what I have seen so far. The problem with lftp thought
for me seems that it can't mirror a local directory to a remote site and I
need to be able to mirror both ways. But I am still looking at it. It does
almost everything else you could think of so it should do that as well.
If anyone is interested is a good tutorial on using lftp here is one I found;
http://www2.papamike.ca:8082/tutorials/pub/lftp.html
It only deals with the FTP side of lftp though.
Thanks,
Randy
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