How to open all the files in all the subdirectories of a folder

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.)

1. Install Xcode from the App Store.
2. Download wget source
3. 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 :)

Change to the initial directory (public_html in the question) and run

find . -name '.htaccess' -print | while read f; do
    ln -s "$PWD/$f" "$PWD/${f//.htaccess}htaccess"
done

PS: I did some rudimentary testing but please make a backup before you run it anyway.