Management and transfer of files is now better handled by the replica manager commands; however direct use of the GridFTP commands is sometimes useful for debugging.
There is often a need to manually transfer files from one node to another. The tool for doing so is globus-url-copy; the older gsincftp commands are deprecated by Globus and no longer part of the EDG release. The command syntax
globus-url-copy [options] sourceURL destURLis rather simple and the help option sufficiently explains the command's options.
Unfortunately, the inline help does not list the protocols supported or give examples of the syntax. The supported protocols are: file, gsiftp, and http. Examples are:
file:///home/loomis/stuff.txt gsiftp://testbed011.cern.ch/~/stuff.txt gsiftp://testbed011.cern.ch//tmp/stuff.txt http://marianne.in2p3.fr/datagrid/documentation/daemon-guidelines.htmlFor the file protocol only absolute file names are accepted. All of the URLs must be fully specified, e.g. you cannot omit the file name on the output URL. For the gsiftp protocol, the tilde syntax can be used to specify a home area.
One great advantage of globus-url-copy is its ability to make third-party transfers. This allows transfers between two remote machines without having to funnel the data through your own machine. This avoids copying the data twice and is especially important if you are executing the command from a machine with a slow network connection or with insufficient disk space.
There are a set of GridFTP client commands available to do simple management of directories and files in a GridFTP server. These commands are:
edg-gridftp-exists edg-gridftp-ls edg-gridftp-mkdir edg-gridftp-rename edg-gridftp-rm edg-gridftp-rmdirand perform the equivalent of their unix namesakes. The only unusual one, edg-gridftp-exists, checks for the existence of a file or directory. Man pages for each of these commands list the valid options and arguments. All of the commands also recognize the help option.
Note: The edg-gridftp-rename, -rm, and -rmdir commands should only be used on files which are not managed by a higher-level service such as the Replica Manager. Using them in this situation may destroy the coherency of the replica database.