VIEW STATUS WITH CONSOLE-BASED FILE TRANSFERS

There are numerous commercial, shareware, and freeware ftp applications to simplify transferring files with ftp. Most of these applications provide a means to monitor the file transfer, some as a numeric counter and others with a graphical status indicator. The indicator can help you detect a hung connection before it times out.

The FTP console command is a free, no-frills alternative to these applications and can be particularly useful if you seldom use ftp other than from Internet Explorer or another browser.

Although the FTP console command doesn't display a status indicator by default, you can turn on an option to display hash marks to indicate transfer status. To do so, first initiate the ftp session with the FTP command. Then, at the ftp command prompt, type the command HASH and press enter. This command works as a toggle. If hashing is off (which is the default), executing the HASH command turns it on. When the command is on, the FTP session displays a # character for each buffer transferred.