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From: eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: BUG (?) in 'ftpd' for 'mget' handling ??
Summary: NeXT does it right and Sun does it wrong
Message-ID: <1077@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Date: 26 Dec 90 05:56:44 GMT
References: <1990Dec22.075502.2891@agate.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Organization: San Francisco State University
Lines: 53

In article <1990Dec22.075502.2891@agate.berkeley.edu>
	izumi@mindseye.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) writes:
>The problem is that "mget *" from a client seems to
>return a  file list which contains entries such as:
>
>subdir_name/filename
>subdir_name/filename2

>I have tested this  in 4.3BSD, and SunOS 4.0.3, 4.1.  The
>problem happens only for NeXT's ftpd.

>Is this a known  problem or a FEATURE?

It's a feature(!), and not something NeXT introduced--you can
blame the friendly folks on Your Own Campus, but before you
complain, read on.

LONG ANSWER:
mget works by sending an FTP NLST command, and executing a RETR
for each name in the returned list.  In ->OLD<- versions of BSD
ftpd, this forked /bin/ls to generate the listing.  So if I had
in my current directory the files

  a  b/d  c

and I did  ls *  it would come back with

  a
  c

  b:
  d

The BSD ftp client is "cleverly" hacked to stop reading when it
gets to a blank line--this it what kept it from descending into
subdirectories.  Unfortunately, this depended on NLST being
"broken"--at least as far as non-BSD clients were concerned.

In post-4.3 ftpds, the "globbing" is done internally (so
NLST * becomes effectively NLST a b c), then each file name
is echoed, and each directory is listed out, giving

  a
  b/d
  c

This behavior is consistent with the requirements of RFC 1123.


SHORT ANSWER:
Use  mget .  instead of  mget *

					-=EPS=-