Feature request: LIST -a for recursive deleting, listing via STAT -l

Tillmann Steinbrecher <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.lftp.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi, 

it's nice to see that gnutls is now working well, and that a full-featured 
version of lftp is in debian again. 

I have two feature requests for the future: 

 - Use LIST -a when getting dirlisting for recursive deleting.
This is somewhere between a bug report and a feature request. When doing "rm 
 -r Directory", lftp will dive into the dir and do LIST there and in all 
subdirs. Then it will delete the files reported by LIST and then RMD the 
directories. However, if the dir contains hidden files like ".message", 
these will not be reported by LIST, therefore not deleted, and RMD will fail 
with something like:
rm: Access failed: 550 Test_Directory/: Directory not empty. 

Not sure if all ftp servers can handle LIST -a - maybe make this behavior 
configurable? 

 - Support listing via STAT -l
Normal dir listing via LIST will require a new connection to be made. 
However, most ftp servers (proftpd, vsftpd, glftpd, openftpd...) support 
dirlisting on the control connection, by sending STAT -l
Clients like FlashFXP, UltraFXP, pftpfxp support it.
Listing via STAT -l is much faster. Even more when SSL is used, since no 
separate SSL handshake is required for each dirlisting. It also allows 
dirlisting when the firewall permits absolutely no other connections than 
the control connection. Maybe this could be implemented as an optional 
feature (e.g. ftp:listing-via-stat) 

bye & thanks for lftp,
Tillmann
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