FTP Question

[shawjames]

Hello,
I have a non-PHP issue, and I wanted to see if anyone had some advice.

I am tranferring to another host, but I need to download my files first. I am having a problem with one directory, it has amassed files over the years, and I think it has around 20,000 files in there. Not really sure, because I cannot open the directory. I've tried AceFTP and BulletProofFTP so far, neither can open the directory without timing out or crashing on the LIST command. Ive tried to just transfer the directory without opening it up... but they always try to do a LIST first and then hang/crash.

I tried old school DOS ftp. ls command lists out the files in the directory, but using the mget * command I have to confirm every file.... is there an override? Cant remember...

Any ideas? This is on a remote host.

Thanks!
-Shaw

[drew010]

could either you or your host tar the directory so its easy to transfer?
if you have shell access just, cd into the directory and do tar -cf dir.tar *
then to shrink it you can do gzip -9 dir.tar
now you have a compressed version of the directory, when you transfer it to the new host do tar -zxfv dir.tar.gz
that uncompresses the contents back out.

[shawjames]

No shell access for me, I could ask my host... but I fear they would more likely delete it then zip it. Any other ideas?

[drew010]

you might be able to use the backtick operator or [man]exec[/man] to execute that command on the folder.

[shawjames]

Could I maybe setup a script in the dest folder to read and save every file in the source?

[drew010]

yeah thats a possibility too.

[LoganK]

20,000 files?? Isn't there a limit to how many files a directory can hold??