a standard way of transferring files from one computer to another on the Internet and on other TCP/IP networks. (See TCP/IP .) FTP is also the name of any of various computer programs that implement the file transfer protocol.

When you connect to a remote computer, the FTP program asks you for your user name and password. If you do not have an account on the computer that you have connected to, you can use anonymous FTP to retrieve files that are available to the general public. In that case the procedure is to give anonymous as your user name and then type your e-mail address in place of the password. Also remember to use the command binary if the file you are transferring is anything other than plain ASCII text. Figure 119 shows an example of an anonymous FTP session.

You can also retrieve files by FTP using a web browser. For example, to retrieve the file whose name is filename in directory pub/directoryname on host ftp.cdrom.com, give the URL as:
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/directoryname/filename
If you need to specify an account name and password, do this:
ftp://userid:password@zzzzz.com/directoryname/filename
Most browsers will prompt you for the password if you leave it out.

Ordinarily, FTP does notwork through certain routers and firewalls. For the solution, see passive FTP .

One of the most popular FTP sites, offering large amounts of free software, is ftp.cdrom.com.