Fetch Help > Commands > Send FTP Commands

The Send FTP Commands command lets you send arbitrary FTP commands to an FTP server, with special support for the Search and Set Upload Permissions commands.

This command is available as:

- The Send FTP Commands command in the Remote menu
- The Send FTP Commands button in the transfer window toolbar, if you've added it

Most file transfer tasks can be handled with Fetch's regular buttons and menu items, but some FTP servers implement non-standard commands, or require use of standard commands in non-standard situations. In these cases, you can send an arbitrary raw FTP command with the Send FTP Commands menu command. It prompts you for one or more FTP commands, and passes them along to the server without interpretation.

The Send FTP Commands command is not available when you are connected to a server using SFTP, because SFTP does not support sending raw commands.

A couple of commands, Search and Set Upload Permissions, that are of special interest to select users can be accessed with the Send FTP Commands dialog as well. Search attempts to search a server for files and folders whose name contains a certain string. Set Upload Permissions lets you specify the permissions to be used for files uploaded to an FTP server in octal format. For more information on these fields, see their respective help topics.

Arbitrary commands should be entered into the Other field of the Send FTP Commands dialog. The Search field expects a string such as you might find in a filename, and the Set Upload Permissions field expects numbers.

Note that arbitrary FTP protocol commands often differ from the UNIX FTP client commands. For example, "cd" is not a valid FTP command, but "CWD" is. Likewise, "ls" and "dir" are not valid commands; the proper commands to list files are "NLST" and "LIST", respectively. FTP commands can be entered in upper or lower case.

If you send a command to list files ("NLST" or "LIST"), Fetch will display the file list in a new text window.

Examples of commands that may be useful (these are specific to UNIX servers):

LIST -lt | - lists files sorted by date
NLST *.hqx | - lists files that end in ".hqx"
HELP | - lists the commands supported by this server

To see the results of some FTP commands, you may need to open the Fetch Transcript window. For example, the list of commands generated by "HELP" appears in the Fetch Transcript window.

Warning: if you enter a command that starts a file transfer, it will almost certainly not work and you may have to close the connection.

Command-line FTP clients have a command called "quote" that is equivalent to the Send FTP Commands command in Fetch. So if you have been instructed to type "quote blah blah", in Fetch you should enter just "blah blah" in the Other field of the Send FTP Commands dialog.

Related topics:

- Search
- Set Upload Permissions