FTPFS refers to file systems that support access to a

File Transfer Protocol The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and d ...

(FTP) server through standard file system

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

s (APIs). The ftpfs command in Plan 9 was originated by

Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and the Unix operating system and B language with long-time colleague Ken Thompson. Ritchie and Thomp ...

and was included in the first release of the system (1992). It arranged for a remote file system reachable via FTP to appear as part of the local file system. In

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

systems, FTPFS was initially implemented as a

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

module that allows the user to mount a

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

server onto the local filesystem, but it was never seen as the perfect way to do it. By 2003, it has been converted to use LUFS, and later to FUSE. Now it is called CurlFtpFS because it uses the universal libcurl for FTP transactions, and is becoming part of the major

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s. There also exists LftpFS for smart mirroring of FTP sites. In

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, a read-only FTP file system is included that can be used either via the GUI (with ) or the command line (mount_ftp). The read-only limitation is noted in the man page for mount_ftp (on a macOS system, in Terminal.app, see "man mount_ftp"). However, the free application Macfusion includes a working implementation of FTPFS. Additionally, macOS Fuse is reported to enable this but the method to do so is undocumented (as of March 4, 2013) either via various obvious man page (e.g. sshfs) or in the macOS Fuse wiki. For

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

and other

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

operating systems, this functionality is partially provided by the "Network Places"/"Network Location" shell facility; a network place is a link to either an FTP server or a

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for conc ...

server and can be accessed in

Windows Explorer File Explorer, previously known as Windows Explorer, is a file manager application and default desktop environment that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user i ...

as just another network filesystem. This does not provide transparent access through the lowest-level

Win32 The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is the foundational application programming interface (API) that allows a computer program to access the features of the Microsoft Windows operating system in which the program is running. Programs can acces ...

file system APIs, however. Such functionality can be provided by third party programs such as WebDrive and FTPDrive.

References

External links

*
LftpFS
* http://macfusionapp.org File Transfer Protocol Computer_file_systems {{Network-software-stub

See also

References

External links