FileZilla

Not to be confused with FileZilla Server.

FileZilla Client

FileZilla Icon
File:FileZilla.png FileZilla 3.0 running in Ubuntu
Developer(s)	Tim Kosse
Initial release	February, 2001
Written in	C++, wxWidgets
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	multilingual
Type	FTP client
License	GPL (free software)
Website	filezilla-project.org

FileZilla Client (also referred to as FileZilla) is a free, open source, cross-platform FTP client. Binaries are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS). As of 5 March 2009, it was the 5th most popular download of all time from SourceForge.net.

FileZilla Server is a sister product of FileZilla Client. It is an FTP server supported by the same project and features support for FTP and FTP over SSL/TLS.

FileZilla's source code is hosted on SourceForge.net. The project was featured as Project of the Month in November 2003.

Features and limitations

The main features of Filezilla are:

Site manager

Allows a user to create a list of FTP sites along with their connection data, such as the port number to use, the protocol to use, and whether to use anonymous or normal logon. For normal logon, the username is saved and optionally the password.

Message log

Displayed along the top of the window. It displays the console-type output showing the commands sent by FileZilla and the remote server's responses.

File and folder view

Displayed under the message log, provides a graphical interface for FTP. Users can navigate folders and view and alter their contents on both the local and remote machines using an Explorer-style tree interface. Users can drag and drop files between the local and remote computers.

Transfer queue

Displayed along the bottom of the window, shows the real-time status of each queued or active file transfer.

As of version 2.2.23, FileZilla uses Unicode internally. As a result, it no longer runs on Windows 9x/ME.

The current binary versions of FileZilla for Mac OS X no longer support Mac OS X v10.4 ‘Tiger’ or earlier. Running FileZilla with versions older than Mac OS X v10.5 ‘Leopard’ requires compilation.

Timestamps

Uploading

FTP mode: Date/timestamps attributes on uploaded files can only be retained if the server supports the MFMT command.
SFTP mode: The said attributes can be retained starting with FileZilla 3.0.8.

Downloading

Date/timestamps on downloaded files can only be retained if the partition on which the files are saved supports timestamps for file creation date and time. E.g. on FAT32/NTFS partitions you can keep in the download folder the original timestamps that the files have on the server. Only newer FileZilla versions support keeping timestamps, and this option has to be enabled from the menu.

History

FileZilla was started as a computer science class project in the second week of January 2001 by Tim Kosse and two classmates. Before they started to write the code, they discussed on which licence they should release the code. They decided to make FileZilla an open-source project, because there were already many FTP clients available and they didn't think that they would sell even one copy if they made FileZilla commercial.

The alpha version was released in late February 2001, and all required features were implemented by beta 2.1.

Version 3 of FileZilla introduced support for operating systems other than Windows, including Linux and Mac OS X.

See also

• FileZilla Server
• Comparison of FTP client software

External links

• Official website
• Project Site (SourceForge.net)