July 16, 2020

Download files recursively through a FTP connection using wget

Unfortunately, SCP and Rsync aren’t always an option to get our files out of a server. When FTP is all we have, wget can still do a pretty good job and not re-download files you already have, like a primitive Rsync.

wget -nc -nH --cut-dirs=<NUMBER_REMOTE_FOLDERS_TO_CUT_FROM_PATH> --ftp-user='<FTP_USER>' --ftp-password='<FTP_PASSWORD>' -rl 0 -P <LOCAL_PATH> 'ftp://<REMOTE_HOST>/<PATH_TO_FILES>'

Explanation for the used flags:

-nc, --no-clobber                skip downloads that would download to existing files (overwriting them)
-nH, --no-host-directories       don't create host directories
--cut-dirs=NUMBER                ignore NUMBER remote directory components
-r,  --recursive                 specify recursive download
-l,  --level=NUMBER              maximum recursion depth (inf or 0 for infinite)
-P,  --directory-prefix=PREFIX   save files to PREFIX/..

<laury.dev/>