Last Updated on: 17th November 2023, 06:18 pm
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Category: Network
Subcategory: File Transfer
Platform: UNIX-like
License: GPL
Interface: CLI
First release: February 1997
LFTP – a file transfer program supporting a number of network protocols (ftp, http, sftp, fish, torrent). Like BASH, it has job control and uses the readline library for input. It has bookmarks, a built-in mirror command, and can transfer several files in parallel. It was designed with reliability in mind.
Every operation in lftp is reliable, that is any non-fatal error is handled and the operation is retried automatically. So if downloading breaks, it will be restarted from the point automatically. Even if ftp server does not support REST command, lftp will try to retrieve the file from the very beginning until the file is transferred completely. This is useful for dynamic-ip machines which change their IP addresses quite often, and for sites with very bad internet connectivity.
lftp has builtin mirror which can download or update a whole directory tree. There is also reverse mirror (mirror -R) which uploads or updates a directory tree on server.
There is command `at’ to launch a job at specified time in current context, command `queue’ to queue commands for sequential execution for current server, and much more.
LFTP supports IPv6 for both FTP and HTTP protocols, and also for BitTorrent. For FTP protocol it uses method described in RFC2428.
Other low level stuff supported: ftp proxy, http proxy, ftp over http, opie/skey, fxp transfers, socks.
LFTP supports secure versions of the protocols FTP and HTTP: FTPS (explicit and implicit) and HTTPS. LFTP needs to be linked with an SSL library to support them. GNU TLS and OpenSSL are both supported as SSL backend.
The project developer is Alexander V. Lukyanov.