I’ve just had the total pain of trying to get files (a lot of files, in a lot of directories) via a musty old FTP client (in Linux/Ubuntu).

The problem is that the FTP client (ftp) doesn’t offer much to help (like recursive downloads, or mapping up the directories on the client side with those on the serverside, etc).

I searched and I found this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-378221.html

…with this excellent snippet (posted by Mr. C.):

wget -r --ftp-user YourUSERNAME --ftp-password YourPASS ftp://FTPSITE//dir/'*.html'

If you want to download something other than *.html, you can change the file name pattern as you would expect.

If you want to add more directories, simply add them, but keep track of the number of slashes (“/”).  There should be only one after the new directory names (at least that’s how I made it work.  It may work wonderfully regardless of the number of slashes, but then again, why challenge fate?)

Happy FTPing!