Escaping from the FTP text transfer

[alancorey]

I've been using Windows/Total Commander since before it did FTP (I think), and there's one thing that's always bothered me.

If you try to transfer a binary file and your current transfer mode is text, there's a warning but no real way out. If you click Yes to abort the transfer you get a zero-byte file, if you click No to continue you get a mangled useless file. What's even worse is if you've got multiple files selected, maybe a few hundred, you have to click either button once for each file, because it doesn't apply your choice to more than one transfer. I just did an End Task on it because it was the simplest way out.

In most cases, what would be handy is a third button to switch to binary mode (and of course not to have it ask again during that batch of transfers).

I'm not a new user, and mostly I know what I'm doing, but this problem has bugged me for years. I use Unix machines a lot, and do almost as many text transfers as binary, but I keep forgetting to switch back to binary.

[Clo]

2alancorey
Hello !
¤ What about setting the "Automatic" mode in the FTP interface?
- I upload / download various files as well binary than text without any problem such as…

 Kind regards,
Claude
Clo

[alancorey]

I've tried automatic mode, but it seems to work only by the file extensions and types they're defined as. If you stat a file under Unix you find the operating system has its own idea of whether the file's binary or text. I don't think that's available to FTP though.

Anyway, my most common method of converting line ends in a file is to ftp one way as binary and ftp it back as text (or the other way round depending on what I want to do). In that case I'm deliberately overriding what automatic mode would do. I like being able to choose, I just wish there was a graceful way out of making a mistake. And it's not graceful to be presented with the same dialog box over again for each file, with no way out except to End Task.