cmdftp / News: Recent posts

cmdftp development has moved to savannah.
Newest downloads are also only available there.

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/cmdftp/

cmdftp-0.9.4 has been released (some time ago).
cmdftp has been recently successfully tested under HP/UX and AIX

A new release of cmdftp is available.
This version addresses some portability problems
and other small issues.
It improves the command line parsing code,
and supports some escaping sequences in commands.
This makes it easier to work with filenames containing arcane characters. Working with filenames and directories containing spaces, for example, is still not recommended, but should work with many servers now.... read more

This release includes some bugfixes, including a serious problem with anonymous ftp when password was not requested.

The latest cmdftp man page, generated using man2html and available in the Docs section of the sourceforge project page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmdftp/

has some output issues, due to recent Sourceforge changes.
This problem has been encountered by other projects, and the discussion is going on here:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1183532&group_id=1&atid=200001... read more

This version includes better error reporting, better temporary directory detection (user can override with TMPDIR env var), a real ChangeLog and some bugfixes. This and future releases will be available in both .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 .

cmdftp code has been restructured to ease future maintenance, and new options and new commands have been introduced. Copy and move commands finally reflect /bin/cp -r and /bin/mv respectively.
Completion has been
improved for directories, and the progress meter has been changed.
Please submit bug reports using the sourceforge bug tracking at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=85857&atid=577534... read more

A preview of where cmdftp development is going can be had by fetching latest CVS code.
Copy and move commands (cp and mv) will reflect behaviour of cp -r and mv respectively. A new ren command will permit renaming of multiple files using a syntax resembling the rename(1) command.
Tab completion handles directories like expected (adding / in the path automagically when completing).

The improductive forum has been removed. You can file bug reports using the Bugs section of the sourceforge page, or send every kind of feedback directly to the author.

cmdftp-0.8.0 has been released. Its main focus is adding large file support.

New features also include long options and two new options:
-a, --attempts N (number of manual login attempts)
-m, --no-manual (disable manual login)

There are some security improvements in the code, some minor bugfixes and documentation has been improved.

If you are not sure about what version of cmdftp suits your needs, see previous news about cmdftp versions.... read more

Some information about current releases:

cmdftp-0.7.3 is the latest 0.7.x release with a tiny source code (without autotools support, but with a custom configure script).

cmdftp-0.7.6 is the latest 0.7.x release. It still produces a tiny executable, but the release is larger (with autotools support).
Can still be compiled directly (cc cmdftp.c)

cmdftp-0.8.x will break direct compilation. It will require using the provided configure script. This has become necessary for some features to be portable (mainly large file support). The produced executable is still tiny. A preview of cmdftp-0.8.0 is available in CVS.... read more

Experimental large file support for cmdftp is available in cvs.
Feedback appreciated.

changes in this version include better tab completion, a new 'dir' command for pretty directory listings, a fix for the progress indicator for large files, and other minor changes and bugfixes.

changes from cmdftp-0.7.4 include a more quiet -q option, a new pwd command, a better man page, C-like escape sequences in the netrc parser, and some code polishing.

changes include autotools-generated ./configure (direct compilation using cc cmdftp.c still ok), a man page, a more quiet 'quiet' option and some bugfixes.

While recoding cmdftp version 0.7.2 in assembler I've discovered some small bugs (the worst being a memory leak in the mv command). Therefore I've suspended cmdftp-nasm development to concentrate on a new patched version of cmdftp, cmdftp version 0.7.3 -
In cmdftp-0.7.3 there will be an experimental change:
dot-files will be ignored by all transfer functions and will not be visible through file listing, in local nor remote mode.
This is to protect sensible files (like .profile, .htaccess, ...) from being overwritten.
Still I don't know whether it's a good idea, so feedback would be very welcome.... read more

If you hate code bloat, the special "new year" version of cmdftp coming for Linux on Intel x86 only is for you.
It's a small gift that maybe some will appreciate.
It will be a complete hand rewrite of cmdftp-0.7.2 in pure x86 assembler (nasm) for Linux, optimized for size, with no dependancy to libc, available in both binary (tiny elf*) and source form.
Maybe it could be useful as a system install tool or whatever, I don't care. For me it's just x86 asm experience. Development is currently around 60%, but I've skipped some features as for now (mainly, the gethostbyname(3) reimplementation and the auto login feature) just to get you something working as soon as possible.... read more

the new version attempts to fix the installation problems on some non-XSI platforms by adding a --disable-std parameter to ./configure to disable the standards enforcement and try a 'compile, run and hope for the best'. Run-time behaviour on non-XSI systems could be affected in misterious and unpredictable ways.
Other changes fi x other small problems in configure/makefile
(notably the bash dependance of the ./configure script in 0.7.1 -which was unintended-).... read more

the development branch has been merged into the main branch resulting in cmdftp-0.7.

An autologin feature has been added to cmdftp, which uses the standard ~/.netrc file. Run
man 5 netrc
on your system for a full descripton of the file format.

Quick and dirty:

machine myhost login my_user_name passwod my_user_pass
machine anotherhost login another_name password another_pass
...
default login guest password guest... read more

I've tried to compile the cmdftp-0.652 release using the compile farm feature of sourceforge, with following successful builds:

[x86] Linux, FreeBSD 4.8, NetBSD 1.6.1
[alpha] Linux
[AMD64] Linux
[PPC-G4] MacOSX 10.2

gcc 2.95.2, 2.96-98, 3.2.2, 3.3.2

Still no luck on Solaris.

cmdftp-0.652 is still a development version. It incorporates patches already available for cmdftp-0.651 and small changes have been made to make it a XSI compliant program.

a new release headed towards C99 + POSIX compliance is near; a prerelease is available from CVS [cmdftp-development]

bad C declarations have been reported by zhap (Tuukka Lehtinen) , which causes compilation to block with error with some gcc versions (2.95.4 as reported).

A patch in the form of a diff -u file is available in the bugs section, and changes have been committed to CVS.

*Thanks to zhap for this one*

A bug existed in versions 0.65 and 0.651 where the ls command seemed to block (if the PAGER env variable is not set), and has been corrected. The changes have been committed to CVS; otherwise see section Bugs for the details and for a patch.

* Thanks to Leon de France for this one *

version 0.651 has been released to match the current cvs version which includes two small but relatively important changes in the code which correct a bug which caused lost connections to be sometimes resumed only after two commands.