Question

I am using the standard Python FTP library to get a file listing and subsequently download files from an FTP site after inspecting the list. This used to be a quick operation, however, the list of files on the site grows daily and is now sufficiently long to cause a significant delay when executing ftp.retrlines('LIST',readFileCallback) to get the file listing.

I am not interested in the full listing on the FTP server. Is it possible to e.g. get a listing of files what are only 1 month old?

Answer 1

You can try passing -t to LIST, some servers support it. This will sort the listing by the modified time (similar to ls).

Typically such filtering/sorting is left up to the client to implement. FTP servers are not obligated to provide server-side filtering (beyond basics).