FTP - Use on Windows IIS

iancrt · Post by **iancrt** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 4:06 pm

hi,

I know a few questions have been raised regarding this since the FTP lib was added. So far everything I have needed to do with FTP worked a treat and was so simple to code (I dont tell my boss that!)

Now I'm in a position where I need to know if a file exists and its date on
FTP. Remember I am talking about connecting to a Windows Server FTP here

FTPDirectoryEntryName returns the filename with the filesize as Prefix. Strange but I can handle that
but
FTPDirectoryEntryDate returns -1

Does anyone know a way I can get the filedate for a file on FTP?
Perhaps an 'undocumented' method that returns the entire server response I can parse myself?

Thanks for any help

Ian

cas · Post by **cas** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 4:29 pm

It should work with native PB commands.
Have you tried connecting to ftp server with some other ftp client (like FileZilla)? Is that other client getting file dates or are they missing there as well?
This is just to make sure ftp server is working fine.

And quick google search returns this info:

Retrieving file creation date/time is only possible with modern FTP servers that support MLST/MLSD extension (and also offer the "create" fact). On most servers, unfortunately, this is not available.

Post by **Fred** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 5:03 pm

Unfortunately, we don't support every servers syntax for directory listing. We will add a command to get the raw line, so it should be possible to parse it easily for any kind of server.

iancrt · Post by **iancrt** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 7:06 am

Thanks for the replies. I look forward to the next release

In the meantime I'll cope without the date.

iancrt · Post by **iancrt** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 3:32 pm

Just to Update:

I managed to get the offending IIS server switched to 'Unix Style' directory listings and the FTP library works fine now.

Obviously not a solution open to everyone but if the options there it all works fine