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lftp: file tranfers with a very smart tool!

lftp is a very nice tool that can simplify file transfer operations that would be complicate to do with shell scripting

lftp generic syntax

• protocol: can be ftp,sftp,http,https
• username: the ftp username, needs to have access to the directories you want to get/put files.
• password: if the password contains characters like @,! that the shell might try to parse them try to escape them like this \! \@
• host: the server
• command: can be common ftp commands like ls mkdir etc, but can be lfpt specific like mirror that we will see some examples, commands must be semicollon separated.

$ lftp protocol://username:password@host -e "command1;command2"

How to mirror an sftp directory to localhost (get)

• mirror: instructs lftp to copy the files from the ftp server to localhost
• source: is a directory on the ftp host
• target: is a directory on local host

One thing you have to be aware is that you need to run lftp as a user which have access rights to the target directory or else copy will fail.

$ lftp sftp://username:password@host -e "mirror source target"