Mosaic and the FTP Protocol

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a protocol that allows a user on one machine to access and transfer files to and from another machine over the Internet. Mosaic usually accomplishes this through anonymous FTP, which allows Mosaic to retrieve publicly available text documents or binary files using the special user ID anonymous.

Mosaic can be used to view documents and other files residing on FTP servers, or it can be used to retrieve any file from an FTP server and save it to a local disk. Mosaic displays an FTP directory listing as a list of hyperlinks.


National Center for Supercomputing Applications
alanb@ncsa.uiuc.edu