ftputil
=======

Purpose
-------

ftputil is a high-level alternative to Python's ftplib module. With
ftputil, you can access directories and files on remote FTP servers
almost as if they were in your local file system. This includes using
file-like objects representing remote files.

What's new?
-----------

From version 1.1 to 2.0, the following has changed:

- ftputil has been re-organized and is now a Python package (the
  import statement is still the same)

- installation via Python distutils

- stat, upload_if_newer, download_if_newer etc. work correctly if the
  server is in another time zone than the client running ftputil (with
  help from Andrew Ittner); see section "Time zone correction" in the
  documentation

- it's possible to set the directory listing format "manually" (though
  in most cases it's recognized automatically); see section "Stat'ing
  files and directories"

- added a workaround regarding whitespace in directory names (thanks
  to Tommy Sundstrm and H. Y. Chu)

- extended documentation and converted it to HTML format (now
  generated from reStructured Text)

- several bugfixes

- there's now a mailing list at http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/ftputil
  (thanks to Holger Krekel)

Documentation
-------------

The documentation for ftputil can be found in the file ftputil.txt
(reStructured Text format) or ftputil.html (recommended, generated
from ftputil.txt).

Prerequisites
-------------

To use ftputil, you need Python, at least version 2.0. Python is a
programming language, available from http://www.python.org for free.

Installation
------------

- *If you have an older version of ftputil installed, delete it or move
  it somewhere else, so that it doesn't conflict with the new version!*

- Unpack the archive file containing the distribution files. If you
  had an hypothetical ftputil version 1.2, you would type at the shell
  prompt:

    tar xzf ftputil-1.2.tar.gz

  However, if you read this, you probably unpacked the archive already. ;-)

- Make the directory to where the files were unpacked your current directory.
  Consider that after unpacking, you have a directory ftputil-1.2. Make it
  the current directory with

    cd ftputil-1.2

- Type

    python setup.py install

  at the shell prompt. On Unix/Linux, you have to be root to perform the
  installation. Likewise, you have to be logged in as administrator if you
  install on Windows.

  If you want to customize the installation paths, please read
  http://www.python.org/doc/current/inst/inst.html .

License
-------

ftputil is Open Source Software. It is distributed under a BSD-style
license (see the top of ftputil.py).

Author
------

Stefan Schwarzer <sschwarzer@sschwarzer.net>

Please provide feedback! It's surely appreciated. :-)

