FTPFS

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FTPFS refers to file systems that support access to a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server through standard file system application programming interfaces (APIs).

In Linux systems, FTPFS was initially implemented as a Linux kernel module that allows the user to mount a FTP server onto the local filesystem but it was never seen as the perfect way to do it. By 2003, it has been converted to use LUFS, and later to FUSE. Now it is called CurlFtpFS because it uses the universal libcurl for FTP transactions and is becoming part of the major Linux distributions. Also exists LftpFS for smart mirror of FTP sites.

In Mac OS X, FTPFS is implemented by a user-mode NFS server that acts as an FTP client, implementing a read-only FTP file system. With MacFUSE, you can use CurlFtpFS to be able to mount a read-write FTP file system. MacFusion serves as a GUI frontend for MacFUSE and CurlFtpFS.

For Windows XP, this functionality is partially provided by the "Network Places" shell facility; a network place is a link to either an FTP server or a WebDAV server and can be accessed in Windows Explorer as just another network filesystem. This does not provide transparent access through the lowest-level Win32 file system APIs, however. Such functionality can be provided by third party programs such as WebDrive and FTPDrive.