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File Transfer Protocol

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is one of the oldest mechanisms on the Internet for retrieving files from remote machines. Files and directory listings can be specified in URLs using the ftp scheme:

    ftp://[username[:password]@]host/path/file

By default the username is anonymous, the username for anonymous file transfer. Explicitly specifying a different username is not recommended if a password is required for that account as it will have to be encoded in the URL, which may be stored in plain text in documents.

An example of an FTP URL is:

    ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.