FTPFS refers to file systems that support access to a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server through standard file system application programming interfaces (APIs).
In Linux systems, FTPFS was initially implemented as a Linux kernel module that allows the user to mount a FTP server onto the local filesystem but it was never seen as the perfect way to do it. By 2003, it has been converted to use LUFS, and later to FUSE. Now it is called CurlFtpFS because it uses the universal libcurl for FTP transactions and is becoming part of the major Linux distributions. There also exists LftpFS for smart mirroring of FTP sites.
In Mac OS X, a read-only FTP file system is included that can be used either via the GUI (with Command-k) or the command line (mount_ftp). The read-only limitation is noted in the man page for mount_ftp (on an OS X system, in Terminal.app, see "man mount_ftp"). Under the now discontinued MacFuse, it was possible to mount writable FTP shares. The successor project (OS X Fuse) is reported to enable this but the method to do so is undocumented (as of March 4, 2013) either via various obvious man page (e.g. sshfs) or in the OS X Fuse wiki. It appears that the only known and documented way, for OS X, to mount a FTP share so that it is writable is via paid GUI programs such as Transmit.
For Windows XP, this functionality is partially provided by the "Network Places" shell facility; a network place is a link to either an FTP server or a WebDAV server and can be accessed in Windows Explorer as just another network filesystem. This does not provide transparent access through the lowest-level Win32 file system APIs, however. Such functionality can be provided by third party programs such as WebDrive and FTPDrive.
See also
