Basic Steps for Using ftam

A typical ftam session consists of the following steps:

Invoke ftam.
Get connected to the remote host.
Use ftam commands.
End the ftam session.

This section describes steps 1, 2, and 4. Step 3 is covered in later sections of this chapter, titled "Managing an ftam Session," "Performing Remote Directory Operations," "Performing Local Operations," and "Performing File Transfers."

Step 1: Invoking ftam

You start a session by entering ftam at your system prompt. This command initiates an interactive session with the ftam program. The system prompt is replaced with the ftam program prompt:

$ ftam
ftam>

After the ftam prompt appears on your screen, you enter various commands to establish connections, transfer files, read directories, and control the behavior of the ftam program itself.

Step 2: Connecting to the Remote Host

Use the open Command

To interact with a particular remote host, enter the open command followed by the name of the host to which you want to connect, as shown here:

$ ftam
ftam> open chicago

This tells ftam you want to be connected to the remote host chicago.

Provide Login Information to the Remote Host

For security reasons, you must provide valid login information for the remote host you specified in step 2. At the prompts that ftam provides, you must supply the remote host with a login name and password it recognizes.

The following example illustrates these steps. Alan Martin starts an ftam session, requests a connection to the remote host chicago, and logs into the remote host with his name and password:

$ ftam
ftam> open chicago
Username (chicago:alan): amartin
Password (chicago:amartin):
Connected to chicago as user amartin.
ftam>

(Alan's password is not echoed to the screen.)

Notice the part of the Username and Password prompts in parentheses. This part of the prompt has this form:

(hostname : username)

The hostname is the name of the remote host you want to connect to. The username is the login name of the user who is invoking ftam. Interactive FTAM provides you this information to help you understand what data it is using as it establishes the connection.

Unless you specify otherwise at the Username prompt, a remote host will use your local login name ^[2]. Notice in the above example that the Username prompt shows alan as the current user. Because his response to the first prompt is amartin, the prompt for Password uses amartin as the username.

To save time, you can specify the name of the host to which you want to connect when you first invoke ftam. For example, the following command, issued at the system prompt, bypasses the need to use ftam's open command :

$ ftam chicago
Username (chicago:alan): amartin
Password (chicago:amartin):
Connected to chicago as user amartin.
ftam>

Alan's password is not echoed to the screen.

To make login even easier, you can create a special FTAM-related file called.ftamrc in your home directory. This file is used to automate the login procedure. See "Streamlining ftam with a Startup File" later in this chapter.

Set a Default Working Directory (Optional)

The default working directory for the remote host is assigned by the remote FTAM implementation. If the remote responder is HP-UX FTAM, the default directory is the "home" or default directory for the login used in the previous step.

If you want to change the current default to a different directory, use ftam's cd command. The cd command is described in more detail later in this chapter.

The following example illustrates all the steps Alan uses to start up an ftam session with a remote HP-UX host, including setting his working directory:

$ ftam
ftam> open chicago
Username (chicago:alan): amartin
Password (chicago:amartin):
Connected to chicago as user amartin.
ftam> cd /users/management/amartin/salaries
/users/management/amartin/salaries is the current working 
directory
ftam>

Alan's password is not echoed to the screen.

Step 3: Using ftam Commands

Using ftam commands is the topic of all sections in this chapter that follow step 4.

All FTAM commands can be abbreviated to include just enough characters to uniquely identify the command you want to execute. For example st is a valid abbreviation for status, and g is a valid abbreviation for get.

Step 4: Ending an ftam Session

To close the current ftam connection, but remain in ftam, enter close at the ftam prompt. If you want, you can then use the open command to open a connection to a different remote host.

ftam> close
Released connection to denver.
ftam> open madrid

To end an ftam session altogether and return to your system prompt, enter quit at the ftam prompt.

ftam> quit
Released connection to denver.
$

Obtaining Help

To get a complete list of all the ftam commands, enter ? at the ftam prompt. To get help about a specific ftam command, enter ? followed by the ftam command. For example:

ftam> ?

ftam> ? open

Notes About Remote File and Directory Names

Note the following important points about remote file names:

Directory names are legal only in ls, dir, and cattr commands. Directory names are not legal as source or destination file names.
Wildcard characters are not legal. This applies to both source and destination names.
Remote file names must be specified with the native syntax, notation, and conventions of the remote host. FTAM cannot translate or negotiate file names between different hosts, so any name you provide has to be valid on the system that uses it.
All names are relative to the remote working directory, unless you provide an absolute pathname for a file or directory (in whatever way the remote system defines "absolute pathname").
The initial remote working directory for file transactions is determined by the FTAM implementation on the remote host. HP FTAM/9000 responders set the initial working directory to be the home directory for the user noted in the "Connected to ..." message during ftam startup (See "Step 2" in the previous discussion). Other (non-HP-UX) FTAM implementations are apt to use different conventions.

^[2]Using an FTAM startup file can give you a different default. See "Streamlining ftam with a Startup File" later in this chapter.