the contents of which can then be read outside of the live FTP connection; this is particularly useful for systems with very long directories (like ftp.uu.net). The above example would put the names of every file that begins with an n into the local file outfilename.
cd
At the beginning of an FTP session, the user is in a "top-level" directory. Most things are in directories below it (e.g. /pub). To change the current directory, one uses the cd command. To change to the directory pub, for example, one would type
ftp> cd pub
which would elicit the response
250 CWD command successful.
Meaning the "Change Working Directory" command (cd) worked properly. Moving "up" a directory is more system-specific—-in Unix use the command cd .., and in VMS, cd [-].
get and put
The actual transfer is performed with the get and put commands. To get a file from the remote computer to the local system, the command takes the form:
ftp> get filename