FTP question

[jeffman]

I'm building an FTP client plugin for an IDE I'd rather not name. I'm learning how to parse all kinds of directory formats. What a pain! Just now I'm adding EPLF, but I can't test it, because I don't know of any servers that actually use this. Google is not much help, or at least I haven't had success. Lots of info about EPLF, but that's not what I need. (Finding VMS servers was also a challenge!)So I'm asking for the addresses of any Anonymous FTP sites you know of that use EPLF. Thank you.

[boen_robot]

Isn't there an FTP server software package that suppors this (and which you can install; on a VM if you must)?Any of those?What's EPLF anyway? And... there are different directory formats?!? I thought the whole idea of FTP is to unify different directory formats... or do you want this plug-in to work with different file systems (like FAT32, NTFS, etc.) on whatever the client OS is? If so, shouldn't there be an OS API for that?

[jeffman]

The FTP spec does not mandate any specific directory format, so the raw string you get from a server in response to a LIST command can vary dramatically. Most servers use a standard Unix format, and even NT and OpenVms can be configured to emulate this. I'd say 95% or more of all servers use this.Native NT looks like a DOS directory, and native VMS is kind of weird.The common feature of all the formats is they are designed to be read by humans, not machines. For example, a Unix mod-date can look like either of these:Jul 18 2009May 13 15:42The second one means the file was modified in the last six months, so they figure the time of day is more significant to the user than the year. So just the date portion needs a special parsing routine.EPLF stands for Easily Parsed Directory Format, and it's a good recommendation. It's robust, but in a predictable way. The best thing is all the fields are comma-delimited. The other formats require pretty long regexes to parse.As a last resort, I can install an FTP host on my desktop and set it to EPLF. I was hoping for something easier, and maybe to get a variety of implementations.