Downloading images from ftp site using wget

Question

I'm trying to set up a script that will synchronise all images in a remote FTP directory with a local directory that I can run on a regular basis to make sure I have all new images added to the remote directory. I've been trying a solution using wget but I just can't seem to get the syntax right. Here is what I have:

wget -r -N --no-remove-listing -nd ftp://user:password@ftp.server.com/images/

All this seems to do is create a local index.html file with a list of links to remote files (which I don't want). How do I modify this command so it just downloads all the images in the remote directory? Alternatively, is there another unix command I can try to synchronise images from a remote FTP site?

Answer 1

Somebody suggested to me to use lftp command (http://lftp.yar.ru/lftp-man.html) like this:

lftp -c 'open ftp.server.com; user username password; mirror -e --only-missing images .; quit'

Seems to work nicely and it's built into most flavours of Unix.

Answer 2

You could try also ncftpget from the ncftp package. See http://www.ncftp.com/ but try to install a ncftp package for your distro.

From "man ncftpget"

-R      Recursive mode; copy whole directory trees.

You  can retrieve an entire directory tree of files by using the -R flag.  However, this will work only if the remote FTP server is a UNIX server, or emulates UNIX's list output.
   Example:

       $ ncftpget -R ftp.ncftp.com /tmp /pub/ncftp

Answer 3

If you want to use WGET, try using the A switch to specify the accepted file extensions:

wget -r --accept=jpg,gif,png ftp://user:password@ftp.foobar.com/blah/*