So you want to recursively copy full FTP directory structures but don’t want to use a GUI client (or can’t)?
Everyone seems to resort to ‘mget’ or multiple-get on the command line but this does not do recursive copies.
The best way is to use wget which will do *exactly* what you want – copy the directories and store them in their original structure. This is incredibly easy to do as follows:
wget -r --user myusername --password mypassword ftp://ftp.mydomain.co.uk/mysite
You’ll see a bunch of entries – one for each file – as follows, showing that it’s working 🙂
--2013-11-16 12:36:48--Â ftp://ftp.mydomain.co.uk/websites/testfile.txt
=> `ftp://ftp.'mydomain
==> CWD not required.
==> PASV ... done.   ==> RETR testfile.txt
Length: 11897 (12K)
100%[==============================================================================>]
11,897     24.1K/s  in 0.5s