Question: I'm trying to crawl FTP and pull down all the files recursively. 

Up until now I was trying to pull down a directory with 

```
   ftp.list.each do |entry|
    if entry.split(/\s+/)[0][0, 1] == "d"
      out[:dirs] << entry.split.last unless black_dirs.include? entry.split.last
    else
      out[:files] << entry.split.last unless black_files.include? entry.split.last
    end

```

But turns out, if you split the list up until last space, filenames and directories with spaces are fetched wrong.
Need a little help on the logic here.

Answer: 
You can also use a regular expression. I put one together. Please verify if it works for you as well as I don't know it your dir listing look different. You have to use Ruby 1.9 btw.

```
reg = /^(?<type>.{1})(?<mode>\S+)\s+(?<number>\d+)\s+(?<owner>\S+)\s+(?<group>\S+)\s+(?<size>\d+)\s+(?<mod_time>.{12})\s+(?<path>.+)$/

match = entry.match(reg)

```

You are able to access the elements by name then

`match[:type]` contains a `'d'` if it's a directory, a space if it's a file.

All the other elements are there as well. Most importantly `match[:path]`.
There are a huge variety of FTP servers around.

We have clients who use some obscure proprietary, Windows-based servers and the file listing returned by them look completely different from Linux versions.

So what I ended up doing is for each file/directory entry I try changing directory into it and if this doesn't work - consider it a file :)

The following method is "bullet proof":

```
# Checks if the give file_name is actually a file.
def is_ftp_file?(ftp, file_name)
  ftp.chdir(file_name)
  ftp.chdir('..')
  false
rescue
  true
end

file_names = ftp.nlst.select {|fname| is_ftp_file?(ftp, fname)}

```

Works like a charm, but **please note:** if the FTP directory has tons of files in it - this method **takes a while** to traverse all of them.