The password itself will not echo. This is to protect a user's security when he or she is using a real account to FTP files between machines. Once you reach the ftp> prompt, you know you're logged in and ready to go.
Notice the ftp.uu.net:joe in the Name: prompt? That's another clue that anonymous FTP is special: FTP expects a normal user accounts to be used for transfers.
dir At the ftp> prompt, you can type a number of commands to perform various functions. One example is dir—-it will list the files in the current directory. Continuing the example from above:
ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls. total 3116 drwxr-xr-x 2 7 21 512 Nov 21 1988 .forward -rw-rw-r— 1 7 11 0 Jun 23 1988 .hushlogin drwxrwxr-x 2 0 21 512 Jun 4 1990 Census drwxrwxr-x 2 0 120 512 Jan 8 09:36 ClariNet … etc etc … -rw-rw-r— 1 7 14 42390 May 20 02:24 newthisweek.Z … etc etc … -rw-rw-r— 1 7 14 2018887 May 21 01:01 uumap.tar.Z drwxrwxr-x 2 7 6 1024 May 11 10:58 uunet-info
226 Transfer complete. 5414 bytes received in 1.1 seconds (4.9 Kbytes/s) ftp>
The file newthisweek.Z was specifically included because we'll be using it later. Just for general information, it happens to be a listing of all of the files added to UUNET's archives during the past week.
The directory shown is on a machine running the Unix operating system—-the dir command will produce different results on other operating systems (e.g. TOPS, VMS, et al.). Learning to recognize different formats will take some time. After a few weeks of traversing the Internet, it proves easier to see, for example, how large a file is on an operating system you're otherwise not acquainted with.
With many FTP implementations, it's also possible to take the output of dir and put it into a file on the local system with
ftp> dir n* outfilename