=head1 NAME

simpleftp - Rudimentary FTP client

=head1 SYNOPSIS

B<simpleftp> I<url> [...]

=head1 DESCRIPTION

B<simpleftp> is a Perl script script that provides basic support for
fetching files with FTP in a batch oriented fashion.  It takes one or more
FTP URLS on the command line.  The file(s) will be retrieved from the
remote server and placed in the current directory with the same basename
as on the remote; e.g., C<ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/active.gz>
is stored as F<active.gz> in the current directory.

=head1 BUGS

B<simpleftp> is an extremely poor substitute for more complete programs
like the freely available B<wget> or B<ncftp> utilities.  It was written
only to provide elementary support in INN for non-interactive fetching of
the files in L<ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/> without requiring
administrators to install yet another package.  Its shortcomings as a
general purpose program are too numerous to mention, but one that stands
out is that B<simpleftp> does not understand the complete syntax of URLs,
only the hostname and pathname parts -- it will not understand username,
password, port or parameter strings.

The Perl libraries that it uses have the advantage of coming with Perl,
even older versions of Perl, but are not C<-w> safe and do not work nearly
as well as Net::FTP.

=head1 HISTORY

Tossed off by David C Lawrence <tale@isc.org> for InterNetNews.

$Id: simpleftp.pod,v 1.1 2003/04/03 00:54:01 rra Exp $

=head1 SEE ALSO

actsync(8)

=cut
