[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]

[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation
License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]

[[!tag stable_URL]]

[[!toc]]

The File Transfer Protocol is a old, simple, and insecure method of
sharing files between computers.  The Hurd supports it via `ftpfs`.

	$ settrans gnu.org /hurd/ftpfs ftp://ftp.gnu.org
	$ cat ftp\:/ftp.gnu.org/README | grep GNU | head -n 2
	This is ftp.gnu.org, the FTP server of the the GNU project.
    gnu/ Contains GNU programs and documents that we develop for the GNU

So it's actually pretty cool to use standard command line utilities to
search through a remote file.  But it is slightly a hassle to set up
`ftpfs` by hand for each server like this.
With the Hurd's [[hostmux]] you can actually skip that first
settrans command, and type in any FTP server and automatically connect
to it.  On my box, this just works:

	$ ls ~/ftp://ftp.gnu.org/

`~/ftp:` is already set up to re-route any path lookup to the correct
FTP server.  You can set up `~/ftp:` on your Hurd OS via the
[[hostmux]] translator:

	$ settrans -c $HOME/ftp: /hurd/hostmux /hurd/ftpfs /

The [[translator primer|hurd/documentation/translator_primer]] shows
you how you can use ftpfs to mount a remote iso file and examine its
contents.