Solved Problems and Sudden Discoveries

Most of the problems were solved but some probably remained (is there a bug free software?) and are described below in "possible problems".

• We discovered that recv() into unallocated pointer hangs OSF/1 3.2 that it needs to be mechanically reset!
• We discovered that a special effort into making a macro for ~/.netrc may core dump the regular ftp client!
• We discovered that when FTPd is being sent command 'pass' instead of 'PASS' (it's told to be case-unsensitive), it prints the entered password into the log file, while it should've printed XXXX.
• We discovered that no extra spaces are allowed when issuing commands to FTPd in a raw TCP/IP connection - 'LIST' would work, but 'LIST ' wouldn't.
• We discovered that if you issue a command to FTPd that requires an argument without that argument you get yacc errors in log file.
• We discovered that last bytes of data connection from server may arrive a bit later than the server's control message that the transfer is complete and therefore reading for transfer complete should wait for some seconds after it looks the remote file is copied into local computer.
• We discovered that if you issue a list of files with a symbol and wildcards it tries to recursively read directories that match, to depth of 1, therefore you always have to list files using just '*'- asterisk.

Possible Problems

Anyways, while working in bash and using remote file access we may advise the following:

• Check the processes that are running under your username. An FTP connection can still be running. You can safely kill it, if you are sure it is not transferring a file.
• Be sure you use correct usernames, passwords or so, and that your .netrc file is of right format. Make sure you can in fact connect to the remote site (line isn't down), otherwise don't get surprised when you get a failure notice. Check yourself with the FTP client, especially running it with '-d' option - debug mode.
• One of Murphy's law says: When you put something into computer, remember where you have put it.
• This package doesn't work if you have FTP accounting for it is too rare and nearly obsolete.
• This package also doesn't work in systems that use passive mode - we never had a chance to test our project on such one.

We hope you'll find this utility useful. We learned ourselves a lot while writing it.