RFC 412 (rfc412) - Page 2 of 10

User FTP Documentation

User FTP Documentation                          Detailed Command Listing


                         FTP User Documentation
                           November 27, 1972


I. Control Characters

      There are several control characters that have meaning to the FTP
Process. First, the abort character is  (SUB), next for
editing, only , , , ,
, , , ,  and  have
any meaning,  (SOH) and  (BS) are the character
delete keys.  is the word delete character, Note: When dowing
the ' funktion, this character will delete the entire line typed.
 says take the next character literally.  (ESC)
terminates the command giving helpful noise words,  and  are
terminators also. These last two will give no command completion or
noise words. All three echo as a space however.   (CAN) and
 (DEL) are the command abort characters.  (DC2) will
retype the line as the command interpreter sees it. When using the ?  as
a prompter, for initial commands, it will type-out all commands that
begin with that particular character string.  If it is typed in a sub-
command field, it will type out the prompt message only if it is the
first character typed. At all other times, it will be accepted as part
of the typed string.


II. General Information

      The FTP user process is designed to make transferring files from
one host on the ARPANET to another much easier than it has been up until
now. To this end, the command language was designed to be as natural as
possible.

      The command interpreter is, of course, part of this idea.
Therefore, to help the user as much as possible, there are several ways
to find out what is expected in the form of commands, file-names, user-
names, etc. When the user has typed nothing, typing a ? will cause the
interpreter to type out all the commands that are available to the user.
If the user has typed anything at all, then it will respond with all
commands that begin with the particular character string.

      So that the command language was as easy to learn as possible, the
command interpreter will 'see' nothing that is not part of a legal
command. If the user types anything that is not expected, the character
is not echoed and a bell is echoed instead.