Opening connection to FTP site
On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, michael watson (IAH-C) wrote:
Hi
Is it possible to open a connection to an FTP site such that I can read
the directory listing? Eg:
URL <- url("ftp://ftp.ensembl.org", open="r")
Error in url("ftp://ftp.ensembl.org", open="r") :
unable to open connection
URL <- url("ftp://ftp.ensembl.org")
open(URL)
Error in open.connection(URL) : unable to open connection
I think perhaps it is because there isn't actually a file there to
connect to, eg this works fine:
URL <- url("ftp://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/README", open="r")
It is not possible using url(). Try, e.g.
tmp <- tempfile()
download.file("ftp://ftp.ensembl.org", tmp, method="lynx") # or "wget"
readLines(tmp)
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595