I suggest you use what comes with OSX, namely sftp/scp, included with every OSX since the age of dawn.
Enable SSH in the sharing (Remote Login), configure what users have access and then try to use sftp from the Terminal (if you are familiar with it). Try
man sftp
to see the help.
DESCRIPTION
sftp is an interactive file transfer program, similar to ftp(1), which
performs all operations over an encrypted ssh(1) transport.
You have the benefits of "ftp-like" plus everything is encrypted.
If you still want to go ahead and use ftp, I suggest you take a look at ftpd conf file, located in /etc/ftpd.conf and /etc/ftpusers
In any case, take a look at the man page for ftpd.conf and ftpusers:
man ftpd.conf
man ftpusers
…to see other options you can add there (because the default one will be most likely empty or with little things in it).
There's no pretty program to configure FTP on OSX (there is on the Server version as far as I can remember).
Please note that FTP is not a very secure protocol by default and hence it should be running inside a chroot. (hint: man ftpchroot).
The curl program could help you download an FTP file, but it specializes in one-off URLs (http, ftp, etc). It is possible to use Perl to script something up to list then download, but its much easier to use wget!
However, wget is not a standard program of OSX so you will need to manually download, compile, and install it (relatively easy task, as long as you have Xcode installed.)
- Install Xcode from the App Store.
- Download wget source
- Open a Terminal into the directory you saved the source.
Run the following commands:
$ tar xfvz wget-latest.tar.gz
$ cd wget-*
$ ./configure && make
The wget binary will be produced in a src subdirectory. From here you can run the binary directly as ./src/wget or install into /usr/local/bin:
$ sudo make install
Now, you only need to run wget -r ftp://username:passwd@server/path/to/download and your FTP site will be recursively downloaded from that path!
Just remember that the /path/to/download is relative to the username you login with... and FTP passwords are notoriously unsecure :)
Best Answer
or
Now, once connected the 5 most common options are:
The only trickery is sometimes you might need to put it into binary mode by typing binary
To exit, type bye
The difference between mine and @grgarside 's solution is his forks it to the Finder using open, while mine uses Terminal