mget in FTP

[Paul Booth (IAD)]

Trying to ftp a number of files using the mget command.

ftp> mget *.rtf

After pressing enter I get the following error:
"Arguments too long".

All of the files I'm trying to FTP are similar to the one below:

009891_claim_391_20011012_094452.rtf

How can I resolve this error.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

Your fundamental problem is that *.rtf is returning more entries than the buffer space for filenames allows. The limit varies from implementation to implementation but you've hit it.

You should be able to mget a subset of those with mget 0*.rtf, mget 1*.rtf ...

Clay

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

doubt here is the length of line name, first you try mget as said by clay, if you couldn't then move the file to a shorter name and do mget

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

doubt here is the length of file name, first you try mget as said by clay, if you couldn't then move the file to a shorter name and do mget

[John Bolene · Accepted solution]

You can also tar all those files up and then ftp the tarball.

Some commands have numbers of files limits, such as rm.

[Wodisch]

Hello,

can you get the list of files?
Then you could create a local "$HOME/.netrc" file, which would contain something like this:

machine THATSERVER login YOURNAME password YOURPASSWORD macdef init
cd /SOURCEDIR
lcd /TARGETDIR
bin
get file1
get file2
get file2
.
.
.
quit

and you would copy in all the filenames (one by one) into that textfile, each line starting with "get ".
Make the permissions like 600 or 400, and then start you "ftp THATSERVER" and watch everything being transfered...

HTH,
Wodisch
PS: Do not forget to delete that file afterwards for security reasons (contains a password).

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

It think it is the *number* of files that mget is trying to get. How many of them are there?. As suggested by others, you need to break them into subsets.

-Sri