Console FTPS (not SFTP) client?

Question

I need to automate some transfers but it seems i can't find a decent command-line ftp client supporting FTPS for the windows platform? winscp supports SFTP but there's no good SFTP server for windows either, only FreeSSHDService which don't seems to be actively supported anymore.. therefore i want to use FileZilla Server which supports FTPS..

Solution 1

Since i wrote the question WinSCP has been updated to support FTPS!

http://winscp.net/eng/docs/ftps

Solution 2

You could use Cygwin and select the openssh lftp package.

(It has a dependency to openssl, so I assume it was compiled using configure --with-openssl)

Solution 3

The cURL library http://curl.haxx.se/ lists FTPS support in its list of features, so presumably the reference client provided with it can be used to make FTPS transfers from the command line.

On the point of "no good SFTP servers for Windows", cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) includes the full OpenSSH package, which comes with both

• a SSH server capable of allowing SFTP (or SCP) transfers
• a command-line sftp/scp client (called scp) which can be called from Windows scripts (batch files and WSH scripts via the shell.run method) - you just need to be careful to specify paths correctly.

I have used the SSH server provided by cygwin to provide SFTP/SCP support on several Windows systems. Thsi might be better to use instead of FTPS if only because FTPS is not as widely supported, as you have found.

Solution 4

SFTPPlus has some automation features.

Secure file transfer using Open Standards (SSH, SFTP, FTPS, HTTP, PGP etc) plus additional audit & automation for enterprise strength usage.

Solution 5

C-Kermit contains a very good scriptable FTPS client.

The Windows version costs money, but not very much. Unix/Linux versions are free.

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Comments

[user1686]

Do you need a FTPS or SFTP client? Those are very different things - FTPS is simple FTP+SSL, and SFTP is a separate protocol that uses SSH.

[Carl Hörberg]

As stated both in title and in body I'm looking for a FTPS client, not a SFTP client from which there are many to choose from...

[Arjan]

A minor annoyance for those using client certificates to connect: PuTTY uses some proprietary format. (It does offer a free tool to convert standard certs into PuTTY certs, but it does take some extra effort to get it running.)

[Carl Hörberg]

indeed PSFTP is a great SFTP client, but it isn't a FTPS client as i was asking for..

[Carl Hörberg]

too bad you have to pay for it..

[Carl Hörberg]

seems ok, except you only can upload one file at a time.. i want to upload a folders without have to specify each filename..

[Carl Hörberg]

true, SFTP feels more solid, but i still think it's strange that there's hundreds of normal FTP clients but so few with FTPS support, when only need to wrap the FTP socket in a SSL tunnel..

[nik]

@Carl, My bad. I misread your need for a SSL FTP connection. Sorry for that.

[Axel]

True. You could try using the Windows "forfiles" command [a simple utility found in recent versions (you'll find it in the resource kits for older Windows releases) that does the basics of the "find" command you may be familiar with from Unix/Linux/BSD/cygwin] to run multiple calls curl for the files in a directory structure.

[Carl Hörberg]

lftp is great, but cygwin is always such a hassle :(

[Carl Hörberg]

ah, this could work.. but it doesn't give a feeling of a very solid application thou.. the command-line options are very limited and the GUI is kind of ugly..

[Arjan]

Cygwin a hassle? Why? (I read in your profile Works just as easily in windows servers as in a linux system...?)

[djangofan]

Yep, Putty is pretty much a standard FTP client (and it supports regular non-ssl ftp) but the difference is that it connects on the telnet port 22 and it accepts a cert and it tunnels through into the ftp service on port 21.

[William T Froggard]

@djangofan Maybe you figured this out by now but, putty is not an FTP client. It supports SFTP, which is basically an FTP/SSH hybrid protocol. Doesn't really work anything like FTP. Also, telnet is port 23. SSH is port 22.