Using Anonymous FTP to Access Technical Reports

These are instructions on the use of anonymous ftp to download copies of the CS Division technical reports, University of California, Berkeley.

Please note that these reports are also made available through the CS Division Gopher Server, ftp.cs.berkeley.edu - port 70. For those with access to gopher or xgopher clients, this may be an easier way to access the reports.

To effectively use ftp, please first read the ftp manpage for your system. On UNIX, this may be done as

	% man ftp 		


To use ftp, connect to the technical report server with
	% ftp tr-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu 

And enter your full internet name as the "password" (your full name is the name you give to others off-site to send you mail, for example "myname@myoffice.mysite.edu".

To receive an index of technical reports available, after entering your name as password, continue by typing

	cd tech-reports/ADM	
	get csd.pricelist 	
	quit			

To then copy a certain technical report (say it was called "report1", Then

	cd /pub/tech-reports/csd	

Then move to the directory that holds the report wanted (you'll get this from the techrpt.listings file). For example:

	cd csd-00-000		
	ls			

Many of the reports and the illustrations for them are not straight-forward text; they've been compressed or tarred or something. For these to copy correctly through ftp, you must let ftp know by issuing the command

	binary			

In fact, for UNIX systems, you might want to automatically issue this command right after the password.

Now you can access the file you file by typing "get" followed by its name, as in

	get somefile.1		
	get somefile.2		

If there are many similarly named files, you may want to use "wildcards" along with the "mget" command (stands for "multiple get"), as in

	mget somefile.*		
  • .PS files (if available) are preformatted. If the report is available in postscript, it is best to use this version. This type of file can be READABLE and needs a special viewer tool called gs or ghostscript. Ghostscript is a programming language similar to Adobe Systems' PostScript (tm) language, which is in turn similar to Forth. The PS files are preformatted and can be printed.
  • .TIF files are large files. Check your system if you able to retrieve ALL the pages of the report. TIF files are READABLE ONLY and also requires a viewer tool called xv. XV is an interactive image display for the X Window System.
  • .OCR files are scanned images converted into ASCII and are NOT READABLE. The OCR process is rather error prone. We do not make any attempt to manually correct the many errors produced in this way. We intend the resulting ".ocr" files be used for research purposes only. In any case, they are not to be confused with authoritative versions of the reports.
  • .Z files are compressed files and tranfer mode requires to be changed to binary.
  • Please read the README file in each directory.
    Any other questions, send e-mail to tr-help@cs.berkeley.edu