Purpose

ftputil is a high-level FTP client library for the Python programming language. ftputil implements a virtual file system for accessing FTP servers, that is, it can generate file-like objects for remote files. The library supports many functions similar to those in the os, os.path and shutil modules. ftputil has convenience functions for conditional uploads and downloads, and handles FTP clients and servers in different timezones.

What's new?

From version 2.1 to 2.2, the following has changed:

• Results of stat calls (also indirect calls, i. e. listdir, isdir/isfile/islink, exists, getmtime etc.) are now cached and reused. This results in remarkable speedups for many use cases.
• The current directory is also locally cached, resulting in further speedups.
• It's now possible to write and plug in custom parsers for directory formats which ftputil doesn't support natively.
• File-like objects generated via FTPHost.file now support the iterator protocol (for line in some_file: ...).
• The documentation has been updated accordingly.

Possible incompatibilities:

• This release requires at least Python 2.3. (Previous releases worked with Python versions from 2.1 up.)
• The method FTPHost.set_directory_format has been removed, since the directory format (Unix or MS) is set automatically. (The new method set_parser is a different animal since it takes a parser object to parse "foreign" formats, not a string.)

Documentation

The documentation for ftputil can be found in the file ftputil.txt (reStructuredText format) or ftputil.html (recommended, generated from ftputil.txt).

Prerequisites

To use ftputil, you need Python, at least version 2.3. Python is a programming language, available from http://www.python.org for free.

Installation

• If you have an older version of ftputil installed, delete it or move it somewhere else, so that it doesn't conflict with the new version!

• Unpack the archive file containing the distribution files. If you had an hypothetical ftputil version 1.2, you would type at the shell prompt:

  tar xzf ftputil-1.2.tar.gz

  However, if you read this, you probably unpacked the archive already. ;-)

• Make the directory to where the files were unpacked your current directory. Consider that after unpacking, you have a directory ftputil-1.2. Make it the current directory with

  cd ftputil-1.2

• Type

  python setup.py install

  at the shell prompt. On Unix/Linux, you have to be root to perform the installation. Likewise, you have to be logged in as administrator if you install on Windows.

  If you want to customize the installation paths, please read http://docs.python.org/inst/inst.html .

License

ftputil is Open Source Software. It is distributed under the new/modified/revised BSD license (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html ).

Authors

Stefan Schwarzer <sschwarzer@sschwarzer.net>

Evan Prodromou <evan@bad.dynu.ca> (lrucache module)

Please provide feedback! It's surely appreciated. :-)