.TH FTPFS 4
.SH NAME
ftpfs  \- file transfer protocol (FTP) file system
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B ftpfs
[
.B -/dq
]
[
.B -m
.I mountpoint
]
[
.B -a
.I password
]
.I system
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Ftpfs
dials the TCP file transfer protocol (FTP) port, 21, on
.I system
and mounts itself (see
.IR bind (2))
on
.I mountpoint
(default
.BR /n/ftp )
to provide access to files on the remote machine.
If required by the remote machine,
.I ftpfs
will prompt for a user name and password.
The user names
.B ftp
and
.B anonymous
conventionally offer guest/read-only access to
machines.
Anonymous FTP may be called without user interaction
by using the
.B -a
option and specifying the
.IR password .
.PP
By default the file seen at the mount point is the user's
remote home directory.
The option
.B -/
forces the mount point to correspond to the
remote root.
.PP
To avoid seeing startup messages from the server use option
.BR -q .
To see all messages from the server use option
.BR -d .
.PP
To terminate the connection,
.B unmount
(see
.IR bind (1))
the mount point.
.SH EXAMPLE
You want anonymous FTP access to the system
.BR export.lcs.mit.edu .
The first
.IR import (4)
command is only necessary if your machine does not have access to the
desired system, but another, called
.B gateway
in this example, does.
.IP
.EX
import gateway /net
ftpfs -a yourname@yourmachine export.lcs.mit.edu
.EE
.SH SOURCE
.B /sys/src/cmd/ftpfs
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.IR bind (2)
.SH BUGS
.PP
Symbolic links on remote Unix systems will always have mode 0777
and a length of 8.
.PP
After connecting to a TOPS-20 system, the mount point will contain
only one directory, usually
.BR /n/ftp/PS:<ANONYMOUS> .
However, walking to any valid directory on that machine will succeed
and cause that directory entry to appear under the mount point.
.PP
.I Ftpfs
caches files and directories.  A directory will fall from the cache
after 5 quiescent minutes or if the local user changes the
directory by writing or removing a file.
Otherwise, remote
changes to the directory that occur after the directory has
been cached might not be immediately visible.
.PP
There is no way to issue the appropriate commands to handle special synthetic
FTP file types such as directories
that automatically return a
.B tar
of their contents.