I found out that the particular FTP client that ships with a SuSE distribution is 'lukemftp' which contains this additional "preserve" command. After uninstalling this and installing a different FTP client I was able to get the timestamp behavior that was desired without any additional fuss, but now I know about netrc.
Thanks, Mike -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steffen Maier Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 5:23 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: FTP file timestamps On 09/16/2011 08:48 PM, Frederick, Michael wrote: > There is a subcommand/setting in (SLES9/10/11) FTP called "preserve", > which says whether or not the timestamp on the file when you transfer > it gets rewritten or not. It is defaulted such that the timestamp on > a 'get' remains the same. > > I have been asked if there is a way (other than issuing 'preserve > off') to set this via some '.ftp_profile' or configuration file. I > know that I could download the FTP source, find the setting in there, > change it, and recompile the program, but I would think there'd be an > easier way. Can anyone think of how you would do this? I don't know anything about the particular preserve option. However, the traditional ftp client reads ~/.netrc (man 5 netrc), where you can specify users and passwords to use with certain hosts, plus defining macros with "macdef", where the special macro named "init" gets executed automatically on successful login to an ftp host. Maybe you can use this to set the preserve thingy. With the lftp client, there's additionally ~/.lftprc and ~/.lftp/rc and the system-wide /etc/lftp.conf and there seem to be options like ftp:use-mdtm [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3659#section-3]. On the server side, things most probably depend on the specific ftpd implementation. E.g. I found an mdtm_write option with vsftpd with which you can disable the use of the MDTM ftp command to set file modification times (on the server side). Apparently, things depend on the direction of transfer and are not straight-forward according to http://www.rjh.org.uk/ftp-report.html. Steffen Linux on System z Development IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Martin Jetter Geschäftsführung: Dirk Wittkopp Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen Registergericht: Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 243294 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
