Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL!WANCHO From: WANCHO@WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL ("Frank J. Wancho") Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: FTP specmanship? Message-ID: Date: 2 Jun 89 06:38:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 21 Is there any interpretation of either RFC 959 or its roughly corresponding MIL STD which calls for TYPE L 8 to be considered a required command to be implemented in a user ftp? How about QUOTE and DIR? Likewise, is there anything that says that the user ftp program should/must be implemented as a user-interactive program? Sound like *dumb* questions? You bet. Incredible as it may seem, there actually is a vendor's user ftp product without TYPE L 8, QUOTE, and DIR - just "SEND" and "RECEIVE" and either ASCII or BINARY - all menu-driven, fill-in-the-blank, and sent off as a batch job! What I don't understand is that this vendor apparently would rather implement a utility to convert our 8-bit binary files, grabbed with TYPE L 32, than implement TYPE L 8... So, I'm looking for ammunition... Although it's too late in this case to point to the Host Requirements document, I sure hope some clarification statements are included to preclude such elementary loopholes as these. --Frank