(Other command line options of the week.)

--ftp-skip-pasv-ip has no short option and it was added to curl in 7.14.2.

Crash course in FTP

Remember how FTP is this special protocol for which we create two connections? One for the “control” where we send commands and read responses and then a second one for the actual data transfer.

When setting up the second connection, there are two ways to do it: the active way and the passive way. The wording there is basically in the eyes of the FTP server: should the server be active or passive in the creation and that’s the key. The traditional underlying FTP commands to do this is either PORT or PASV.

Due to the prevalence of firewalls and other network “complications” these days, the passive style is dominant for FTP. That’s when the client asks the server to listen on a new port (by issuing the PASV command) and then the client connects to the server with a second connection.

The PASV response

When a server responds to a PASV command that the client sends to it, it sends back an IPv4 address and a port number for the client to connect to – in a rather arcane way that looks like this:

227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,0,1,156,64)

This says the server listens to the IPv4 address 192.168.0.1 on port 40000 (== 156 x 256 + 64).

However, sometimes the server itself isn’t perfectly aware of what IP address it actually is accessible as “from the outside”. Maybe there’s a NAT involved somewhere, maybe there are even more than one NAT between the client and the server.

We know better

For the cases when the server responds with a crazy address, curl can be told to ignore the address in the response and instead assume that the IP address used for the control connection will in fact work for the data connection as well – this is generally true and has actually become even more certain over time as FTP servers these days typically never return a different IP address for PASV.

Enter the “we know better than you” option --ftp-skip-pasv-ip.

What about IPv6 you might ask

The PASV command, as explained above, is explicitly only working with IPv4 as it talks about numerical IPv4 addresses. FTP was actually first described in the early 1970s, quite a lot time before IPv6 was born.

When FTP got support for IPv6, another command was introduced as a PASV replacement.: the EPSV command. If you run curl with -v (verbose mode) when doing FTP transfers, you will see that curl does indeed first try to use EPSV before it eventually falls back and tries PASV if the previous command doesn’t work.

The response to the EPSV command doesn’t even include an IP address but then it always assumes the same address as the control connection and it only returns back a TCP port number.

Example

Download a file from that server giving you a crazy PASV response:

curl --ftp-skip-pasv-ip ftp://example.com/file.txt

Related options

Change to active FTP mode with --ftp-port, switch off EPSV attempts with --disable-epsv.