About FTP, or File Transfer Protocol

What is FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a protocol that allows two machines to send files back and forth between each other. It is widely supported and very common in web hosting services. The bad thing is that it does not support encryption by itself, but in most cases it's not important


What is the FTP command to read a file on the FTP server?

More precisely, what is the FTP command to show the contents of a text file on the FTP terminal directly? There are at least two ways to do this:

First, There are many FTP client and server flavors. They should all support core commands like 'get' and 'put', but other things they allow you do pretty much are up to them. Try the 'page' command.

For example:
ftp>ls
readme.txt
ftp>page readme.txt
............<content of readme.txt>.......

If the contents of the file are too long, you can click space bar to show next page. You can enter 'ZZ' (upper case Z twice) to quit viewing the file. You can also navigate by using the arrow keys.

Second, execute 'get' to transfer the file to your local machine and read it from there. This is a bit of a hassle but it's a sure fire way to work