How can I queue up an entire directory for FTP?

Question

Currently I know how to do this:

curl -T file.zip ftp://server.domain.com/ --user username:password

Which will let me do a single file. However I can't figure out how to do it for a directory. I would like to use a similar command and specify a directory instead of a single file and have it upload that directory and all contents maintaining folder structure. How is that done?

Answer 1

You probably have to use something more sophisticated. FTP itself (if I remember correctly) is not able to transfer entire directories, all it knows about is transferring a file. Thus the client has to translate your request "send this directory" into a sequence of upload this file (possibly preceded by make this directory).

One such sophisticated client is lftp (see also Wikipedia), its mirror -R command should do the job.

(ncftp's ncftpput has a -R flag for this, too.)

Edit Of course you can also do a recursive upload with find and curl's --ftp-create-dirs flag..