How do you change directories using FtpWebRequest (.NET)?

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There’s a blog post from Mariya Atanasova which shows how you can fake it – basically you have to put the directory on the URL.

I suspect you may be better off with a dedicated FTP library though – one that doesn’t try to force everything into the WebRequest way of doing things. I haven’t personally used any 3rd party libraries for this, but a search for “FTP library .NET” finds lots of candidates.

Edit: jcolebrand (in case of 2006 blog linkrot possibility)

Many customers ask us how they can use the CWD command with our FtpWebRequest.

The answer is: you cannot use the command directly, but you can modify the uri parameter to achieve the same result.

Let’s say you’re using the following format:

String uri = "ftp://myFtpUserName:myFtpUserPassword@myFtpUrl";
FtpWebRequest Request = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
Request.Method = "LIST";

The above example will bring you to your user’s directory and list all the contents there. Now let’s say you want to go 2 directories backwards and list the contents there (provided your user has permissions to do that). You close the previous FtpWebRequest and issue a new one with this uri

uri = "ftp://myFtpUserName:myFtpUserPassword@myFtpUrl/%2E%2E/%2E%2E";

This is equivalent to logging in with your user’s credentials and then using cd ../../

Note: if you try using the ”..” directly without escaping them the uri class will strip them, so "ftp://myFtpUserName:myFtpUserPassword@myFtpUrl/../.." is equivalent to "ftp://myFtpUserName:myFtpUserPassword@myFtpUrl/"

Now let’s say you want to go to another user’s directory which is one level above the root. If you don’t specify a user name and password it’s equivalent to logging in as anonymous user. Then you issue a new FtpWebRequest with the following uri

"ftp://myFtpUrl/%2F/anotherUserDir"

This is equivalent to logging in as anonymous and then doing

Cd /
cd anotherUserDirectory

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