File Information

File Sizes

Before retrieving a file, it is useful to know how big it is. This is because transfer speed may be very fast, or as slow as one kilobyte per second depending on factors such as 'heavy traffic congestion' on the Internet. You can find the size of a file by clicking on Server on the Menu Bar, then choosing the Directory Listing option. Click on the OK button to produce a listing.

Each line of the directory listing BEGINS with what is known as the permissions string, which relates to file protection. If the permissions string starts with the letter d (eg drwxr-xr-x), then the line refers to a directory. If the permissions string starts with something else, such as a minus sign (eg -rw-r--r--), then this indicates that the line refers to a file. The file size will be in bytes, and is written just to the left of the date assigned to the file.


The README File

The README file is a text file that contains the string README. It is located in some FTP directories for the information of the user. The user can retrieve this file to find out useful information regarding the file archive. Remember to use the ASCII transfer mode.

After having retrieve the README file, you can read its contents by going to the DOS prompt from Windows (as mentioned earlier in the tutorial) and type type filename then press ENTER. A file longer than one screen-length can be more appropriately displayed by piping into 'more', and this can be done by typing type filename |more then pressing ENTER.


Compressed Files

Many large files on an FTP server will be in compressed format. This helps save congestion when tranferring files but reducing the transfer time. Compressed files will need to be tranferred using the BINARY transfer mode.

Compressed files will be suffixed in a certain way, depending on what utility was used to compress them. A couple of examples are the suffices (or 'extensions') .Z which can be decompressed using the UNIX command uncompress filename, and there is also .zip which Dept Users will find useful since it indicates files suitable for DOS or Windows on 386/486 PCs.

For Dept Users, the decompression program for filenames suffixed with .zip (or .ZIP) is located on the departmental network. All you have to do is to type the command pkunzip filename.zip then press ENTER. It is good practice to first put this file in an empty directory.


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