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The FTP protocol designers understood the need for something like ASCII mode back in 1985. Something the SFTP people had to re-discover in 2005.

Abhay Bhushan, Postel, Reynolds etc did an awesome job!

edit: wrong rfc

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Out of curiosity, why did sftp need ascii mode? I'm drawing a blank trying to think of why sftp would need it.

I use it almost daily in a test/configuration environment to move text conf files to Linux machines we are setting up via scripted process. The Linux hosts have ftp disabled and ssh enabled by default.

I use sftp/scp constantly, but I'm not sure how is an ASCII mode needed/important for that.

Do you transfer text files or binary?

Text I do ascii, always have. Is there a reason, no, but that's how I roll.

I run a MUD which has alot of people from all over the world as developers. Most are not technical and do simple thing like create areas for the game etc. Explaining how to convert files from CRLF to LF only has turned out to be impossible.

When they use modern FTP clients which automatically handle ASCII mode it just works. SFTP seems to work for some users. It probably depends on the clients support for ASCII mode..

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