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?

Since version 2.5 the following changed:

• The stat caching has been improved. I've added an "auto-grow" feature for FTPHost.listdir which in turn applies to FTPHost.walk. Moreover, there were several performance optimizations.
• A few bugs were fixed (#53, #55, #56).

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 2.4. 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 .

If you have easy_install installed, you can install the current version of ftputil directly from the Python Package Index (PyPI) without downloading the package explicitly.

• Just type

  easy_install ftputil

  on the command line. You'll probably need root/administrator privileges to do that (see above).

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 certainly appreciated. :-)