Mount a FTP site from fstab

I still have clients or websites where the most convenient (middle ages based) method of exchanging files is FTP.

Since I’m lazy by nature I don’t like firing up a FTP client, I’d prefer to just have it available on request. For a while the KDE Network Places did the trick. But I decided I want it even easier. Behold curlftpfs.

One

sbopkg -ki curlftpfs

(replace that with apt-get, yum or compile from source depending on your distro) later and I could do this in fstab:

curlftpfs#username:password@ftp.provider.com/folder /mnt/clientusingftp fuse rw,allow_other,noauto,user 0 0

I left noauto because access to this folder is slow on slower remotes hosts. Of course you can also do this at the command line:

curlftpfs ftp://ftp.sunet.se/ sunet/

Cheers!