How to download all file with name emp* using curl from a FTP site

Question

How can I get all files downloaded from a FTP site directory with file name like emp*.

Please suggest.

Answer 1

I tested this bash one liner against a CentOS 6.5 FTP mirror successfully, but I have anonymized it to prevent abuse:

for i in `curl -i ftp://ftp.example.com/pub/centos/6.5/updates/i386/repodata/ | awk '{print $9}' | grep ^8`; do curl -O http://ftp.eample.com/pub/centos/6.5/${i} ; done

To explain, this goes to the ftp server, gets the directory listing (first curl), pipes the data into awk to only return the filenames. Finally, this is piped into grep to only match on those files starting with the number 8 to simulate your emp* requirement.

Those filtered filenames become the variable i and I then use a simple for loop to fetch each one by appending them to the URL for the second curl request. I ended up with these two files:

-rw-r--r--  1 adam  staff      362 11 Jul 13:22 819455e9f840760fcbdccf0283e4324ceabc8512f246e911d39424760ed1729e-primary.xml.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 adam  staff      360 11 Jul 13:22 8e4d3dd261375d31b35b6870e187d841633c68a400e4d11bb7234fea517cdbaa-other.xml.gz

Answer 2

If I'm not missing something all you need to do is cd in to the directory and use "mget emp*". You may want to change the "prompt" setting (it's a toggle command) if you don't want to respond to every file Y/N.