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 shows you how you can use ftpfs to mount a remote iso file and examine its contents.