18.1 Commands

Once tftp is running, it issues the prompt and recognizes the following commands:

? command-name

Print help information.

ascii

Shorthand for mode ascii

binary

Shorthand for mode binary

connect host-name [port]

Set the host (and optionally port) for transfers. Note that the TFTP protocol, unlike the FTP protocol, does not maintain connections between transfers; thus, the connect command does not actually create a connection, but merely remembers what host is to be used for transfers. You do not have to use the connect command; the remote host can be specified as part of the get or put commands.

get file-name

get remotename localname

get file…

Get a file, or a set of files, from the specified sources. The source can be in one of two forms: a file name on the remote host, if the host has already been specified, or a string of the form ‘host:filename’ to specify both a host and file name at the same time. If the latter form is used, the last hostname specified becomes the default for future transfers. When specifying a numeric IPv6 address as host part, then this address must be enclosed between square brackets, since it contains colons and would interfere with the delimiter before the file name. Brackets are optional for IPv4 addresses.

tftp> get [2001:1234::12]:issue

mode transfer-mode

Set the mode for transfers; transfer-mode may be one of ‘ascii’ or ‘binary’. The default is ‘ascii’.

put file

put localfile remotefile

put file… remote-directory

Put a file or set of files to the specified remote file or directory. The destination can be in one of two forms: a filename on the remote host, if the host has already been specified, or a string of the form ‘host:filename’ to specify both a host and filename at the same time. If the latter form is used, the hostname specified becomes the default for future transfers. If the remote-directory form is used, the remote host is assumed to be a UNIX machine. The same use of square brackets for enclosing numeric IPv6 addresses applies here, as was mentioned for the command get.

quit

Exit tftp. An end of file also exits.

rexmt retransmission-timeout

Set the per-packet retransmission timeout, in seconds.

status

Show current status.

timeout total-transmission-timeout

Set the total transmission timeout, in seconds.

trace

Toggle packet tracing.

verbose

Toggle verbose mode.

Because there is no user-login or validation within the tftp protocol, the remote site will probably have some sort of file-access restrictions in place. The exact methods are specific to each site and therefore difficult to document here.