(Note: This is from 2001 and has not been touched since)

What is publicfile why does it need this patch?

Please see http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html for an explanation what publicfile is. Basically, it's a secure FTP and HTTP server package. My patch adds support for the FTP commands "MDTM" and "SIZE", which return the modification time and size of a file, respectively.

What does your diff do?

The publicfile ftpd uses the easily parsable list format, which lists both size and modification time in a clear and easy-to-parse way, but requestion a file list from the FTP server requires opening a second TCP connection, which wastes resources on the server and on the network. So, many clients try to use SIZE and MDTM instead, which currently fails. This causes ncftp to not set the date of the downloaded file to the remote date, even if you apply my patch.

Where can I get the patch?

Simply download publicfile-0.52-mdtm.diff.gz. Beware: unified diff format (you probably need GNU patch to apply it).

See Also

If you like this, you should probably also go to:

1. my patches for ucspi-tcp
2. my diet libc which can be used to create Linux binaries with considerable less resource usage than glibc.
3. my daemontools patches
4. my djbdns patches