[nathanm]

Is there such a thing as an FTP client application which can perform a search for a text string?  I've got these FTP servers with a nest of folders and need to look for a certain part number.

[mattyturner]

Short answer - no. Even the best programs i've used for FTP only let you search within a directory.

If it has SFTP too then you would be able to search via an SSH connection.

Depending on the size of the directories perhaps you could download everything overnight and search locally?

[nathanm]

Yep, I did try downloading the whole directory but it crapped out somewhere along the line overnight, so I only got partial files.  It's like 500MB of stuff and the transfer speed was not great.  I may just have to nag them for the files I need.

[turkey]

Is there such a thing as an FTP client application which can perform a search for a text string?  I've got these FTP servers with a nest of folders and need to look for a certain part number.

I remember seeing an ftp client that did this, but I don't think it was for Mac OS X.

Essentially what it does is grab a directory listing for the top directory and all subdirectories. It stored that and let you search the entire thing.

I think what I'd probably do is scarf the whole thing with wget and then search locally.