Understanding the FTP protocol for transferring files

In this section, you will be introduced to the FTP protocol for transferring files and the ftplib package for interacting with Python.

The File Transfer Protocol

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) protocol allows us to make file transfers through a connection in a network. This is the protocol that we use to connect remotely to servers and manipulate files. Port 21 is usually used.

The protocol design is defined in such a way that it is not necessary for the client and server to run on the same platform; any client and any FTP server can use a different operating system and use the primitives and commands defined in the protocol to transfer files.

To interact with this protocol...