[a1369209993]

> i.e. CWD, CWD foo, RETR bar; what do FTP servers even do with this?

If you go by shell sematics, that pokes around the home directory of the user running the FTP daemon; hopefully that doesn't actually work.

> it's ftp://example.net/%2Ffoo/bar that you must use if you want bar inside the foo directory inside the root directory

This smells like a security vulnerability for most setups.

[mananaysiempre]

> This smells like a security vulnerability for most setups.

Yes, but if you look around on some old FTP servers (like on the few still-extant mirror networks) you’ll find that some do actually let you CWD to the system /, and sometimes they even drop you there by default (so you have to CWD pub or whatever to get at the things you actually want).

[jfrunyon]

> If you go by shell sematics, that pokes around the home directory of the user running the FTP daemon; hopefully that doesn't actually work.

This is why FTP servers have default directories. They're the equivalent of user home directories. By the way, many FTP servers (especially historically) map FTP logins to real, local users.

> This smells like a security vulnerability for most setups.

How do you figure? Surely your sensitive files aren't world-readable... /s