How do I Search files on a ftp server?

Basically for work I need to search for PDFs with date in the name. Really slow to go the folder and find individual files. Its on a windows machine.

Any help welcome!

Tradition would say there should be a text file at the top level either describing where stuff is and/or a recursive directory listing.

Thanks for the help. Reading my initial post it appears I have not described the ideal solution. The search ideally would provide a list of the desired files so I could click and print them out.

It's not possible using a 'normal' ftp client. The protocol doesn't support it. This thread seems to indicate that totalcommander can do it though:

http://serverfault.com/questions/285...the-ftp-server

FileZilla, an FTP and SFTP client can perform a search for you.

http://www.addictivetips.com/windows...filezilla-325/

Assuming you know the format of the date, you can do a regex search as well and display all PDFs with a valid date string in the filename

Thanks for the suggestions. I found winscp which will provide a handy list. Unfortunately I can't either open or copy the list. I can copy the path or open containing folder. 3/4 of the way there :)

Assuming it has a command line effort then <command> > filelist.txt will do it.

My batch-fu isn't what it once was but some combination of find/findstr should then let you pull particular files.

The lazy option is just to pull all the files to a local directory. Or slightly less lazy (but I think requiring win 8) is just to map the ftp server as a network drive and let Explorer do the work

Ninja edit: just checked on my work (win 7) laptop and that had the option as well.

Just mapped the drive in win 7. Search function appears a bit lacking so will fiddle if I get the chance.

What programming language are you writing in?

Regardless, the concept is the same - you need to retrieve the folder listing using FTP, write those values to an array in your programming language of choice then do the search on that array. Once it's filtered, to retrieve a file/files you'd need to do multiple GET commands.