On 7/12/24 04:29, Simon Josefsson wrote:
What does FTP offer that SSH-based Secure FTP doesn't?
In brief (and from memory):
- the ability to faithfully transfer files of almost any format
(not just byte streams) between machines with similar file systems
- some ability to convert between different character encodings
while transferring
- some ability to transfer files between different formats (source
file format is different than destination file format)
- the ability of a 3rd machine to mediate a transfer directly
between two other machines (widely used in broadcast TV where the
files being transferred are huge, and the machines are usually on
the same LAN)
- "anonymous FTP" if so enabled by the server (in theory could be
done with SSH, but FTP servers generally do support this, and I'm
not aware that SSH servers do.)
My perception is that most people have migrated away from ftp to http for the majority of use-cases (anonymous downloads), and to sftp for authenticated/encrypted use-cases. Rsync is also common, but not documented by the IETF at all.
My impression is similar to yours. But there are still "corner
cases" in which FTP provides useful functionality that sftp does
not. For example, there are still machines with file systems that
support a wide variety of file types.
Keith
