I'd envision the -x/--proxy option being changed to support the standard FTP proxy methods, in addition to the HTTP options they now support. These almost always involve FTP'ing to a proxy (or more typically a firewall) server, and then using some wacky combination of proxy (firewall) ID's combined with the real FTP server's username. In many cases, the firewall/proxy doesn't require it's own password...

We'd also need to have the -U/--proxy-user option enhanced to work with these FTP proxies.

Finally, we'd need to introduce some new option (perhaps --ftp-proxy-type) that would tell curl what to do with the proxy info for an FTP request. The DEFAULT would need to be "HTTP", so that today's behavior is unmodified. The default port for FTP-protocol proxies should be 21, rather than 1080...

A tool I often use (FileZilla) shows the following options:

  SITE hostname (followed by USER,PASS in the usual fashion)
  USER after logon (not sure how this one actually works)
  Proxy OPEN (presumably USER,PASS to the proxy, then another OPEN command...)
  Transparent (???)
  USER with no logon (???)
  USER FireID_at_Remotehost (PASS FirePass_at_RemotePass)
  USER RemoteID_at_remoteHost FireID (PASS RemotePass FirePass)
  USER RemoteID_at_FireID@RemoteHost (PASS RemotePass_at_FirePass, this is Firewall-1's approach)

FileZilla source code is available (SourceForge), so someone with enough time to implement this should be able to look up and see how these are used behind the scenes.

The RemoteID, RemoteHost and RemotePass are the "remote" FTP server's; the FireID and FirePass are the firewall/proxy's password.

Hope this helps,
- Kevin

-------------------------------------------------------
This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
Welcome to geek heaven.
http://thinkgeek.com/sf
Received on 2003-04-14