How to connect to FTP from Finder with ‘@’ in the credentials

finderftp

I haven't been able to connect to an FTP server from Finder, if I use other client there is no problem.

The username I am using to connect is in the form user@domain. The domain part in the user name is not related to the ftp server I am trying to connect to, is just that the user name contains an '@'.

I found a similar issue where the password contains '@', in my case it is in the username.

found that any password with an '@' symbol in it caused Finder to
immediately display that error and not even try to send any traffic to
the FTP server.

For real, is Finder unable to connect to FTP servers if there are '@' in the credentials?

Host is specified here

Host is specified here

Then credentials are specified here

enter image description here

It is a common and very simple use case, so it is hard to believe that Finder, the default file explorer doesn't support it.

Best Answer

I personally am not surprised this is broken, but then again, I have larger faults with Finder's ftp implementation than this problem. From someone that's used to ftp on the command line, it's second nature to think of the @ as reserved to delineate the user part of the string with the host name part of the string, so perhaps that's a bug that the author of the code introduced.

Just as you're finding it hard to believe this is broken, I find it hard to believe Apple hasn't removed ftp from finder entirely and just pointed people to the Mac App store for a ftp client of their choosing at this point. Here's to hoping they do that for 10.9.

Assuming you are in need of a solution today, here are suggestions to work around it:

  • Try using ftp from the command line
  • Try to escape the @ with \ or otherwise trick the finder into getting past it as a delimiter
  • Use another program like Transmit that has more robust handling of any valid strings.
  • Searching the Mac App store in April 2013 yields no less than 56 choices for FTP.