This describes the set of shell functions supplied with the source
distribution as an interface to the zftp
builtin command, allowing you
to perform FTP operations from the shell command line or within functions
or scripts. The interface is similar to a traditional FTP client (e.g. the
ftp
command itself, see ftp(1)), but as it is entirely done
within the shell all the familiar completion, editing and globbing features,
and so on, are present, and macros are particularly simple to write as they
are just ordinary shell functions.
The prerequisite is that the zftp
command, as described in
The zsh/zftp Module
, must be available in the
version of zsh
installed at your site. If the shell is configured to
load new commands at run time, it probably is: typing ‘zmodload zsh/zftp
’
will make sure (if that runs silently, it has worked). If this is not the
case, it is possible zftp
was linked into the shell anyway: to test
this, type ‘which zftp
’ and if zftp
is available you will get the
message ‘zftp: shell built-in command
’.
Commands given directly with zftp
builtin may be interspersed between
the functions in this suite; in a few cases, using zftp
directly may
cause some of the status information stored in shell parameters to become
invalid. Note in particular the description of the variables
$ZFTP_TMOUT
, $ZFTP_PREFS
and $ZFTP_VERBOSE
for zftp
.