What is anonymous FTP?

The ability to access a remote computer system on which one does not have an account, via the Internet’s File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Users have restricted access rights with anonymous FTP and usually can only copy files to or from a public directory, often named /pub, on the remote system. Users can also typically use FTP commands, such as listing files and directories. When using anonymous FTP, the user accesses the remote computer system with an FTP program and generally uses anonymous or ftp as a logon name. The password is usually the user’s e-mail address, although a user can often skip giving a password or give a false e-mail address. In other cases, the password can be the word anonymous. Many FTP sites do not permit anonymous FTP access in order to maintain security. Those that do permit anonymous FTP sometimes restrict users to only downloading files for the same reason.