Ubuntu – Automatic directory triggering in ftp

Check if Midnight Commander (mc) is installed. If so, you can do ftp from there.

When using ncftp you should have the ability to create directories at both a local and remote location:

1. lmkdir This command creates directories on the local host
2. mkdir This command creates directories on the remote host

Bear in mind that you will need suitable permission on the remote host to create any directories.

Below is an example on my own ftp server, I have obscured the username and password and added in a few arrows:

andrew@corinth:~$ ncftp ftp://username:password@andrews-corner.org/andrews-corner.org/test/
NcFTP 3.2.5 (Feb 02, 2011) by Mike Gleason (http://www.NcFTP.com/contact/).
Connecting to 208.113.217.97...
DreamHost FTP Server
Logging in...
User username logged in
Logged in to andrews-corner.org.                                
Current remote directory is /andrews-corner.org/test.
ncftp /andrews-corner.org/test > mkdir hello_sysadminboy                      <-----
ncftp /andrews-corner.org/test > dir                                          <-----
drwxr-xr-x   14709624 227249                Sep 12 12:50   hello_sysadminboy  <-----
ncftp /andrews-corner.org/test > quit
andrew@corinth:~$

You can see from the above that I have:

1. Successfully logged in and automatically changed to a test directory
2. Created the remote directory 'hello_sysadminboy'
3. Tested the directory with the dir command

If you wanted to script this sort of thing something like the following works well on my system:

#!/bin/sh

ncftp ftp://username:password@andrews-corner.org/andrews-corner.org/test/<<EOF
mkdir hello_sysadminboy
dir
EOF

Unfortunately the mkdir -p command does not work remotely to create nested directories and brace expansion is ignored...