Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!rbj From: rbj@uunet.uu.net (Root Boy Jim) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl Subject: Re: even better chat2.pl, and a useful (but simple) ftp client! Message-ID: <1991May17.023908.23168@uunet.uu.net> Date: 17 May 91 02:39:08 GMT References: <1991May8.213911.15714@NCoast.ORG> <1991May15.235542.3938@uunet.uu.net> Organization: UUNET Communications Services, Falls Church, VA Lines: 85 In article emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti) writes: ?In <1991May15.235542.3938@uunet.uu.net> rbj@uunet.uu.net (Root Boy Jim) writes: ? ? Even so, consider the size of our ls-lR.Z: ? 376 -rw-r--r-- 1 rick 371745 May 15 03:39 /usr/spool/ftp/ls-lR.Z ? ?What fraction of this is ? ?-rw-r--r-- 1 16 21 5624 Sep 19 1989 part02.Z ?-rw-r--r-- 1 16 21 5504 Sep 19 1989 part03.Z ?-rw-r--r-- 1 16 21 4531 Sep 19 1989 part04.Z ?-rw-r--r-- 1 16 21 5045 Sep 19 1989 part05.Z ?-rw-r--r-- 1 16 21 3046 Sep 19 1989 part06.Z [rbj@uunet 38] zcat ~ftp/ls-lR.Z | grep 'part[0-9]*.Z$' | wc 5274 42192 284667 from the line below: [rbj@uunet 42] expr 284667 / 17111 = 16% ?nonsense with close to zero information content? You want us to ftp ?back a third of a megabyte full of that? (not to mention all of the ?old outdated versions of software that uunet has long after new ?versions are announced.) no way. esp. not over this person's 19.2kb ?line. I wonder how much could be saved by deleting old versions. And sometimes the old versions are better (but rarely). Perhaps we should include a ls-sR.Z as well. I'd rather have you retrieve this list as a text file than to generate it on the fly. ? and also: [rbj@uunet 29] zcat ~ftp/ls-lR.Z |wc ? 39816 227715 1711169 ? ? We don't need people stat'ing 4000 files several times a day, ? or worse yet, at night. As I said, please be careful. ? ?you have control over your ftp server, turn it off it you don't like it. When you snarf something from another machine via anonymous FTP you are a guest in their house. Please act politely. ?it; reject recursive directory descents at the top level or two of ?your hierarchy. A good point. However, some people feel that it isn't really worth writing code to do this, especially since that puts the power into anyone's hands, including novices and pinheads alike. ?if it's that bad, it's within your power to solve it ?by administrative policy rather than jawboning us poor coders into not ?writing code. Yes, it appears that such attempts are fruitless. ?uunet is very different from the ordinary anonymous ftp system; There are bigger sites than us, better organized. Reorganization is on our to do list. ?many of the other 1000 or so sites have adequate CPU to handle a ?well-aimed request. That's all I was asking. Please aim well. We aim to please. ?if the net as a whole is beating up on your ?machines so bad, why don't you drop a few grand on a nice scsi disk ?and a cheap risc machine, call it "ftp.uu.net", and let the world know ?that it's out there. ftp.uu.net is a cname for uunet.uu.net, and we do ask people to use it. We may actually make it a separate machine someday. I suppose the real reason is that ~uucp == ~ftp. I suppose we could mount it via NFS tho. In another letter you mentioned better ftp client/servers. Well it just so happens that Rick is in charge of BSD ftp and has made several enhancements. They include restarting in the middle of transfers, sending the modification time, only transferring newer versions, etc. The world would be a better place if more people ran it. -- [rbj@uunet 1] stty sane unknown mode: sane