Center for Research in Water Resources

University of Texas at Austin

Getting Data From CRWR's Anonymous FTP Site

The Center for Research in Water Resources (CRWR) has an anonymous ftp site where anyone can log in and download data. This page is intended to provide some help for people who are new to anonymous ftp. General information (i.e. logging in, moving arround) and an example are provided below.

Logging in

Address: ftp.crwr.utexas.edu
Login: anonymous
Password: your e-mail address

You might wonder why you are asked to supply your e-mail address, since this is supposed to be anonymous ftp. The reason why we are asking you to supply your e-mail address is so we have an idea of who visits the site and what data get's accessed most, etc. You will not get any "junk e-mail".

Moving arround

To move arround the site and find what you are looking for the following commands are useful:

pwd lets you know in what directory you presently are.
ls lists files and directories in the current directory.
cd directory changes to the specified directory.
cd .. changes to the parent directory.

Setting transfer modes

Files can be transfered in different "modes". In general ASCII or plain text files should be transfered in ASCII mode. Coverages and compressed files should be transfered in BINARY mode. The following commands set the transfer modes:

asc sets the transfer mode to ASCII.
bin sets the transfer mode to BINARY.

Getting data

Once you have located the files you want to download you can use the get command to download the files. The syntax is as follows:

get file

Uploading data

To upload something to the ftp site you can use the put command. The syntax is as follows:

put file

Logging out

To log out type bye.

Example

The syntax for downloading the "evap.shp" file from the "/pub/gisclass/ex1/evap" directory is as follows:

C:\>ftp ftp.crwr.utexas.edu
Connected to nile.crwr.utexas.edu.
220 nile.crwr.utexas.edu FTP server (SunOS 4.1) ready.
User (nile.crwr.utexas.edu:(none)): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
Password:bill_gates@microsoft.com
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp> cd pub
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> cd gisclass
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> cd ex1
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> cd evap
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> ls
200 PORT command successful.
150 ASCII data connection for /bin/ls (146.6.90.23,2280) (0 bytes).
evap.dbf
evap.shp
evap.shx
226 ASCII Transfer complete.
30 bytes received in 0.00 seconds (30000.00 Kbytes/sec)
ftp> bin
200 Type set to I.
ftp> get evap.shp
200 PORT command successful.
150 Binary data connection for evap.shp (146.6.90.23,2281) (1892 bytes).
226 Binary Transfer complete.
1892 bytes received in 0.16 seconds (11.82 Kbytes/sec)
ftp> bye
221 Goodbye.

C:\>