I have a FTP class which does pretty much everything. All has worked well so far, until last night when we discovered that a FTP server we were trying to connect to was returning the file list format in a different format.

Basically, a FTP server returns the directory listing like this:

total 4696
drw-rw-rw-   1 user     group           0 Feb  6 15:46 .
drw-rw-rw-   1 user     group           0 Feb  6 15:46 ..
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user     group        4825 May  3  2010 Account.png
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user     group        5242 May  3  2010 Administration.png
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user     group        4117 Apr 17  2011 Agent.png
-rw-rw-rw-   1 user     group        1402 Dec 30  2005 AmazonCA.gif

However, what I received was this:

-rwxrwxrwx   1 owner    group            4480 Feb 15  2:25 8A17T2T1.txt

We can see there is an offset starting from the number of bytes.

I can check for a space character at a specific position to determine how to extract the number of bytes, the date and the name. Otherwise, I would apply a lookup based on the offset of that other format.

Anyone would have a comment on this?