WU-FTPD Files and Directories With Spaces

This one got me thinking a bit today, and I didn’t find much in the way of info on the net, so here it is for my own and anyone else’s reference.

Solaris 9 and later ships with WU-FTPD as it’s FTP server. General configuration, is done via the /etc/ftpd/ftpaccess file, which is the same file used by WU-FTPD, just in a different location.

The problem I had was I could create directories from the command line, but couldn’t from within Gnome’s Nautilus when logging in anonymously. Every attempt resulted in:

Ah, simple permissions I thought. But wait, it can’t be as I can quite easily create directories from the command line. So I turned to logging. As soon as I enabled logging, the problem became very clear:

Bingo! Check the name it’s tried to use - “untitled folder“. My tests on the CLI didn’t include spaces. The error has also kindly told me where to look - the path-filter line in my /etc/ftpd/ftpaccess file. I checked this and sure enough, it doesn’t allow for spaces in file and directory names.

Changing the line to allow spaces…

path-filter guest,anonymous /etc/ftpd/filename.msg ^[[:alnum:][:blank:]._-]*$ ^[.-]

… resolved the issue. Note: it should all be on one line.

The same issue affects Windows users using Explorer to access FTP and create directories as it tries to create a new folder called “New Folder“.