Okay, we're in. ftp> is our prompt, and the ftp program is waiting for commands. There are a few basic commands you need to know about. First, the commands
and
both give file listings (where file is an optional argument specifying a particular filename to list). The difference is that ls usually gives a short listing and dir gives a longer listing (that is, with more information on the sizes of the files, dates of modification, and so on).
The command
will move to the given directory (just like the cd command on UNIX or MS-DOS systems). You can use the command
to change to the parent directory
.
The command
will give help on the given ftp command (such as ls or cd). If no command is specified, ftp will list all of the available commands.
If we type dir at this point we'll see an initial directory listing of where we are.
Each of these entries is a directory, not an individual file which we can download (specified by the d in the first column of the listing). On most FTP archive sites, the publicly available software is under the directory /pub, so let's go there.
Here we can see a number of (interesting?) files, one of which is called README, which we should download (most FTP sites have a README file in the /pub directory).