Terminal Tips: FTP

By C.K. Sample, III

I use this one all the time.  Sure there is integrated FTP in OS X, as well as a slew of cool free FTP tools like Cyberduck and Fugu. 
I use both of these programs and think they are great.  However,
every once in a while, I'm browsing around the web, and I try to click on a link that should download and Safari / Firefox tries to open the file as a text document. Then I CTRL+Click on the link and try to save the file locally, but Safari / Firefox decides to, again, treat said file as a text file, thereby ruining it (I realize I can also click "Save as..." and set the file type, but sometimes the only option it gives you is text).

In these situations, I quickly CTRL+Click and copy the link, and then launch the Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities/). In the Terminal, I
type ftp at the command line then Command+V to paste the previously copied web address and hit enter. Boom! The file downloads to the root directory of my hard drive. This is also good for large files that keep failing, as the command line FTP can resume in case of disconnects. Give it a shot.
 

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