ftpdir: directory listing of an FTP directory.

In drmjc/mjcbase: General helper functions for dealing with \R objects/data types

Description

Uses ncftpls, and via ftp.opts and ls.opts, you can specify a range of options. see examples, and type ncftpls on the commandline to see the full range of options. ncftpls behaves differently depending on whether there's a trailing slash. in this R version, all URL's will have a trailing slash.

Usage

ftpdir(url, ftp.opts = "", ls.opts = "", pattern = NULL,
  full.names = FALSE)

Arguments

url	the full url to the directory. need trailing '/' to get just the filenames.
ftp.opts	a non-NULL character vector of FTP options. see ncftpls help
ls.opts	a non-NULL character vector of ls options. see ncftpls help
pattern	an optional regular expression. Only file names which match the regular expression will be returned. The pattern is applied to the filename, not the whole URL.
full.names	logical: if TRUE, the ftp url is prepended to the file names to give a fully specified ftp url. If FALSE, the file names, (rather than FTP URL's) are returned. Added for compatibility with dir.

Value

a chracter vector of output. usually a file listing

Warning

on OSX and Ubuntu, the '-g' and '-gg' recursive modes don't work. untested on CentOS. '-R' mode does work, but produces a long listing. note '-R -1' does not recurse.

TODO

implement recursive, by in the back end, doing ls.opts="-l" & selecting directories by "^d"

Author(s)

Mark Cowley, 2013-05-21

Examples

# connect to port 10021 of Garvan's FTP server & do a listing
ftpdir("ftp://ftp.pwbc.garvan.unsw.edu.au/pub/genepattern/modules/NormalizeAffymetrixST/chip/", ftp.opts="-P 10021", ls.opts="-1")
ftpdir("ftp://ftp.pwbc.garvan.unsw.edu.au/pub/genepattern/modules/NormalizeAffymetrixST/chip/", ftp.opts="-P 10021", ls.opts="-1", full.names=TRUE)
ftpdir("ftp://ftp.pwbc.garvan.unsw.edu.au/pub/genepattern/modules/NormalizeAffymetrixST/chip", ftp.opts="-P 10021", ls.opts="-1")

# recursive, long listing
ftpdir("ftp://ftp.pwbc.garvan.unsw.edu.au/pub/genepattern/modules/NormalizeAffymetrixST/chip/", ftp.opts="-P 10021", ls.opts="-R")

# recursive, short listing (doesn't work)
ftpdir("ftp://ftp.pwbc.garvan.unsw.edu.au/pub/genepattern/modules/NormalizeAffymetrixST/chip/", ftp.opts="-P 10021", ls.opts="-1 -g")

#  As above, but append a "/" character to directory pathnames. (doesn't work; doesn't add trailing slash...)
ftpdir("ftp://ftp.pwbc.garvan.unsw.edu.au/pub/genepattern/modules/NormalizeAffymetrixST/", ftp.opts="-P 10021", ls.opts="-1 -gg")

# test patterns
ftpdir("ftp://ftp.pwbc.garvan.unsw.edu.au/pub/genepattern/modules/NormalizeAffymetrixST/chip/", ftp.opts="-P 10021", pattern="rn4")

drmjc/mjcbase documentation built on May 15, 2019, 2:27 p.m.