| Important |
This is a reminder that all source code and support for this book can now be found at http://www.apress.com, even though references within the chapters may point to http://www.wrox.com. |
FTP is one of the oldest and best-known Internet protocols. It is familiar to most web developers as a standard way to transfer files from one system to another. This chapter provides a complete overview of PHP's FTP support by focusing on the practical aspects of using the FTP extension.
PHP's FTP extension focuses on the non-interactive use of FTP and is not a substitute for a complete FTP client. It is well suited for automated file transfer or for building web-based FTP clients (see below for a sample of this type of script).
This chapter is broken up into three major sections:
The first section demonstrates how PHP's FTP extension works. It is intended to quickly familiarize the reader with the extension.
The second section focuses on the development of two different applications based on PHP's FTP extension:
A convenience wrapper to use FTP functions for moving files between servers
A simple web-based FTP client
The third section contains three different complementary function references:
The first function reference groups the FTP functions by purpose. Each function listing in the group contains a function prototype and a brief description.
The second reference is an alphabetical list of commands. Each command has a function prototype, a technical description of its functionality, and a usage example.
The third reference correlates common FTP client commands to the appropriate PHP FTP function.