Technical Briefs

ROHAN help Files

ftp file types

There are two basic types of files you will want to get from a remote host:

1. ASCII files (text) which means they have not been saved in the file format of the application that created them.
2. BINARY files (programs, non-text) which means they have been saved in the file format of the application that created them. Also, many of these are saved as archived and/or compressed files.

You can usually tell the type of file you are transferring by the name of the file extension. The file extension is the last three letters of a filename after the period. Often, ASCII files will have no extension at all. Use the following chart as a guide:

File Extensions [Kind] and Their Transfer Mode

.ARC [Archive/Compression]

BINARY

none [Text documents]

ASCII

.doc [Text document]

ASCII

.gif [Graphical Interchange Format]

BINARY

.Hqx [BinHex - Archive]

ASCII

.pit [PackIt - Archive/Compression]

BINARY

.sea [Self-extracting Archives]

BINARY

.sit [StuffIt - Archive/Compression]

BINARY

.tar [Tape Archive - Archive/Compression]

BINARY

.txt [Text document]

ASCII

.z [compress]

BINARY

.ZIP [PKZIP - Archive/Compression]

BINARY

To transfer in BINARY mode, you must use ftp to tell the host you want BINARY mode. Syntax is:

ftp> binary

the host will respond with

ftp> 200 Type set to I

To return to ASCII mode, the syntax is:

ftp> ascii

ftp> 200 Type set to A