As we all know, downloading a directory from an FTP server over FTP over the command line is not possible. Some, have found mget to be the holy grail, I certainly do not.
I was restoring my music backup from my NAS, and I didn’t want to do it the GUI way, so CLI is the other, obvious option.
Trying to do a recursive fetch using the FTP prompt, did not work whatsoever.
Here is the better solution: recursive wget.
$ wget -r -l 0 ftp://user:password@server/directory
wget will now recursively fetch that entire directory.
Note: In some cases, you would need to pass the –username and –password arguments to wget.