Chapter 7: FTP (5 of 6) -- THE KEYBOARD CABAL

    System administrators are like everybody else -- they try to make
things easier for themselves.  And when you sit in front of a keyboard
all day, that can mean trying everything possible to reduce the number of
keys you actually have to hit each day.
     Unfortunately, that can make it difficult for the rest of us.
     Connect to many ftp sites, and one of the entries you'll often see
is a directory named bin.
     You might think this is a bin where interesting things get thrown.
It's not.  "Bin" is short for "binary," i.e., the programs that make the
ftp site work, to which you won't have access anyway.
     Etc is another seemingly interesting directory that turns out to be
another place to store files used by the ftp site itself.  Lost+Found
directories are used by Unix systems for some routine housekeeping --
again, nothing of any real interest.
     Then, once you get into the actual file libraries, you'll find that
in many cases, files will have such non-descriptive names as V1.1-
AK.TXT.  The best known example is probably a set of several hundred
files known as RFCs, which provide the basic technical and organizational
information on which much of the Internet is built. These files can be
found on many ftp sites, but always in a form such as RFC101.TXT,
RFC102.TXT and so on, with no clue whatsoever as to what information they
contain.
     Fortunately, almost all ftp sites have a "Rosetta Stone" to help you
decipher these names.  Most will have a file named README (or some
variant) that gives basic information about the system.  Then, most
directories will either have a similar README file or will have an index
that does give brief descriptions of each file.  These are usually the
first file in a directory and often are in the form 00INDEX.TXT.  Use the
ftp command to get this file.  You can then scan it  online  or
 download  it to see which files you might be interested in.
     Another file you will frequently see is called ls-lR.Z.  This
contains a listing of every file on the system, but without any
descriptions (the name comes from the Unix command ls -lR, which gives
you a listing of all the files in all your directories).  The Z at the
end means the file has been compressed, which means you will have to use
a Unix un-compress command before you can read the file.
     And finally, we have those system administrators who almost seem to
delight in making things difficult -- the ones who take full advantage of
Unix's ability to create absurdly long file names.  On some FTP sites,
you will see file names as long as 80 characters or so, full of capital
letters, underscores and every other orthographic device that will make
it almost impossible for you to type the file name correctly when you try
to get it. Your secret weapon here is the mget command.  Just type mget,
a space, and the first five or six letters of the file name, followed by
an asterisk, for example:

          mget This_F*

The FTP site will ask you if you want to get the file that begins with
that name. If there are several files that start that way, you might have
to answer 'n' a few times, but it's still easier than trying to recreate
a ludicrously long file name.