Is there a way to download through telnet

Question

I am transfering colleges and I have a lot of files from the first college that I would like to keep. The files are are on a Sun server which I can only access using telnet. Is there a way to download the files from the server using telnet?

Answer 1

The easiest way is if you can run binaries on the machine, so set up a simple ftp server or something. If you can't do that, perhaps a combination of tar/gz to get one file, and then you can netcat it across? As a last restore, uuencode and cat could be used.

Answer 2

Using netcat ? If you have numerous files, I suggest to tarball them.

On the server side (using telnet port):

$netcat -l -p 23 < my_file.tar

On the client side:

$netcat machine_name 23 > my_file.tar

Netcat tool may exist named as "netcat" or "nc", check that out on your server machine.

Answer 3

It all depends on what you're allowed to do on the machine. One simple solution is to send all files by mail to yourself if you have access to a mail client.

Answer 4

Only way I see is to tar everything and convert it to base64. Once you are done with that, just "cat" it on remote side. If your telnet client (e.g. putty) has log, just log everything in file.

Once received, just unbase64 and untar it. That should give you your data.

But do notice that this procedure is pain-in-the-ass and it takes a while for any significant amount of data.