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I am having problems transferring a text file from Windows 7 using ftp.exe to a FreeBSD server. After the file transfer the end-of-line characters are not changed from \r\n to \n, Instead they remain with the carriage return character which can be seen in for example mcedit as ^M. The file is transferred in ascii mode.

Has anybody run into similar problems in the past? As far as I know using the ascii mode during FTP transfer should convert those characters automatically. Does it depend on the server configuration?

EDIT: The file can be seen here.

EDIT: I have also tried with ncftp.exe under Cygwin but the result is the same. The carriage return character has not been removed even if the transfer type was ASCII.

EDIT: It does not work the other way round either. I created a text file in FreeBSD and then downloaded it is ASCII mode to my Windows machine. The end of line characters remained LF as they were in FreeBSD.

EDIT: The lit stat returns

211-FTP server status: Connected to 160.135.126.21 Logged in as user TYPE: ASCII No session bandwidth limit Session timeout in seconds is 320 Control connection is plain text Data connections will be plain text At session startup, client count was 9 vsFTPd 2.3.4 - secure, fast, stable 211 End of status
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  • Is this UTF or ASCII? Is it like XML? Or is it source code? Check the header of the file in hex dump that it's a normal file. Commented Jul 1, 2012 at 16:42
  • @AndrewSmith: No, it is a "normal" txt file created by notepad.exe. It is not an XML file. I also put a link to the file. Commented Jul 1, 2012 at 16:45
  • So this is FTP Server, because windows client does this conversion by default on *.txt files. Commented Jul 1, 2012 at 16:50
  • Well windows client can do this, are you sure you have this problem, e.g. you are in ASCII mode? Do you have windows XP? Commented Jul 1, 2012 at 16:54
  • @AndrewSmith: Yes I am sure, that I am in ASCII mode. Right now I am trying with another ftp client I will update my question with the results of this research. As described in the question I use Windows 7. Commented Jul 1, 2012 at 17:21

1 Answer 1

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vsFTPd, in a misguided effort to make their daemon "very secure", has disabled ASCII EoL conversion by default. It has to be manually re-enabled by editing the configuration (/usr/local/etc/vsftpd.conf by default) file and adding the following lines:

ascii_upload_enable=YES ascii_download_enable=YES
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  • Thank you! This solved the problem. Right now the conversion is done automatically when in ASCII mode. Commented Jul 2, 2012 at 18:16
  • Those settings seems completely backwards. When set to NO, unix(mac)-to-unix FTP converted files to crlf line endings. Enabling the setting results in files with the correct unix-lf newline line endings. Thanks! Commented Jan 15, 2015 at 16:11

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