mitchis has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am using Net:FTP and need a script to ftp to a server and retreive files without knowing the names of these files. Is there something like $ftp->get("%", "PATH"); and % is a wildcard? Thanks, -Mitch

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Re: Using NET::FTP with Unkown File Names
by lhoward (Vicar) on Jul 06, 2001 at 23:17 UTC
    No Net::FTP does not support wildcards directly, but Net::FTP has an ls method that you can use to get a list of files on the remote server. Then just loop through this list and download them... 
        use Net::FTP;

    $ftp = Net::FTP->new("some.host.name", Debug => 0);
    $ftp->login("anonymous",'me@here.there');
    $ftp->cwd("/pub");
    my @l=$ftp->ls();
    foreach(@l){
      $ftp->get($_);
    }
    $ftp->quit;

    [download]
    be sure to add error checking code to the above for "real live" use
[reply]
[d/l]
      As an additional sanity check, you may want to add something like 
      if ( $ftp->size($remoteFileName) <> -s $localFileName) {
  die "file size mismatch\n";
}

      [download]
      after the transfer. We have seen cases where the get() succeeded but the file was not complete.
[reply]
[d/l]

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