VMS Help TCPIP Services, FTP, FTP Conventions  *Conan The Librarian (sorry for the slow response - running on an old VAX)

    Use the following rules for command syntax, quotation marks, and
    wildcards when you type FTP command lines.

    o  Command formats

       With the FTP command and most of the commands at the FTP
       prompt, you can use either DCL-style or UNIX style syntax. For
       example, the DCL-style DIRECTORY and UNIX style ls commands
       produce the same results

    o  Quotation marks

       When you communicate with a non-OpenVMS host, you need to
       enclose the following with quotation marks:

       o  UNIX path names

       o  UNIX file names with slashes

       o  Lowercase or mixed-case host names, user names, passwords,
          file names, and command lines

       In the following example, UNIX path names need quotation marks
       around them:

       FTP> put MY.DOC "/usr/users/evt/my.doc"
       200 PORT command successful.
       150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /usr/users/evt/mydoc (130.180.4.8,1
       789).
       226 Transfer complete.
       local: WORK1$:[VANA]MY.DOC;2  remote: /usr/users/evt/my.doc
       289 bytes sent in 00:00:00.01 seconds (20.15 Kbytes/s)
       FTP>

    o  Wildcards

       You can use wildcards in the following FTP commands: DELETE,
       DIRECTORY, GET, PUT, MGET, MPUT, MDELETE, and MLS.

       The wildcard characters recognized by FTP are:

       o  The percent sign (%) to represent an individual character

       o  The question mark (?) to represent an individual character

       o  The asterisk (*) to represent multiple characters

       If any of these characters are part of a file name (not
       used as a wildcard), you can disable recognition of these
       characters as wildcards by either enclosing the file name in
       quotation marks or using the DISABLE PARSE command.

    o  Qualifiers

       In a DCL-style command line, you can place a command qualifier
       anywhere on the command line. It is a good practice to follow
       the OpenVMS recommendation to place the qualifier after the
       command name.