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11.1 Command line options

Many command line options have counterparts among the commands handled by the internal interpreter.

-4 ¶

--ipv4

Initially set addressing to IPv4 only.

-6 ¶

--ipv6

Initially set addressing to IPv6 only.

-A ¶

--active

Enable active mode transfer. Default mode for ftp.

-d ¶

--debug

Enable debugging output and possibly also socket debugging.

-e ¶

--no-edit

Disables the editing of commands. This is default setting for batch mode, without a TTY, or when the environment variable TERM is not set or its value is ‘dumb’.

-g ¶

--no-glob

Disables file name globbing.

-i ¶

--no-prompt

Turns off interactive prompting during multiple file transfers.

-N netrc ¶

--netrc=netrc

Set a preferred location of the .netrc file, thus overriding any environment setting in NETRC, as well as the default location $HOME/.netrc, see The .netrc file.

-n ¶

--no-login

Restrains ftp from attempting auto-login upon initial connection. If auto-login is enabled, ftp will check the .netrc (see The .netrc file) file in the user’s home directory for an entry describing an account on the remote machine. If no entry exists, ftp will prompt for the remote machine login name (default is the user identity on the local machine), and, if necessary, prompt for a password and an account with which to login.

-p ¶

--passive

Enable passive mode transfer. Default mode when invoked as pftp.

--prompt[=prompt] ¶

Print a command-line prompt, even if not on a tty. If prompt is supplied, its value is used instead of the default ‘ftp> ’. Notice, that the argument is optional.

-t ¶

--trace

Enable packet tracing (not implemented).

-v ¶

--verbose

Start in verbose mode, printing informational messages. This is default for interactive mode.