Per the original spec, in FTP URLs,
- ftp://example.net/foo/bar will get you bar inside the foo directory inside the default directory of the FTP server at example.net (i.e. CWD foo, RETR bar);
- ftp://example.net//foo/bar will get you bar inside the foo directory inside the empty string directory inside the default directory of the FTP server at example.net (i.e. CWD, CWD foo, RETR bar; what do FTP servers even do with this?);
- and it’s ftp://example.net/%2Ffoo/bar that you must use if you want bar inside the foo directory inside the root directory of the FTP server at example.net (i.e. CWD /foo, RETR bar; %2F being the result of percent-encoding a slash character).
Pretty sure CWD by itself isn't even valid (at least RFC959 assumes it has an argument), and therefore // isn't valid in FTP URLs.
The %2Ffoo/bar is needed because of the fact that FTP CWD and RETR paths are system dependent (with, theoretically, system dependent path separators), but URLs are not, so the FTP client breaks the URL on / and sequentially executes CWD down the tree so that it doesn't need to know what it's connected to.
In other words: URL paths are not system paths, and it's a mistake to think of them as such.
(Alternate in other words: FTP is awful)
So, I looked it up carefully and it appears that (despite the promises in later RFCs such as 2396 and 3986) the current specification of the ftp scheme is still the ancient RFC 1738 which predates not only the URL / URI distinction but even the notion of relative URLs. In §3.2.2 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738#section-3.2.2> it specifically says that a null segment in the path should result in a “CWD ” command (i.e. CWD, space, null string argument) being sent to the FTP server, going against both the current RFC 959 and its predecessor 765 (apparently the earliest formal specification of FTP to include CWD) which require the argument to CWD to be non-null.
Thus apparently a conformant implementation of the ftp URL scheme cannot be a conformant implementation of an FTP client. Joy.
It still seems unlikely that Berners-Lee et al. would specifically call this case out if it were useless at the time... What were the servers that made this necessary, I wonder?
> FTP CWD and RETR paths are system dependent (with, theoretically, system dependent path separators), but URLs are not
Thank you, that’s the insight that I was missing. So a %2F inside an ftp URL component is just performing a (sanctioned) injection of the (supposedly UNIXy) server path syntax.
> FTP is awful
I’d go with “unbelievably ancient, with the attendant problems”, but yes. Funny how it still manages to be better than everything else (that I know) at transferring files by not multiplexing control and data onto the same TCP connection. (I think HTTP over QUIC can do this as well?)
If you go by shell sematics, that pokes around the home directory of the user running the FTP daemon; hopefully that doesn't actually work.
> it's ftp://example.net/%2Ffoo/bar that you must use if you want bar inside the foo directory inside the root directory
This smells like a security vulnerability for most setups.
Yes, but if you look around on some old FTP servers (like on the few still-extant mirror networks) you’ll find that some do actually let you CWD to the system /, and sometimes they even drop you there by default (so you have to CWD pub or whatever to get at the things you actually want).
This is why FTP servers have default directories. They're the equivalent of user home directories. By the way, many FTP servers (especially historically) map FTP logins to real, local users.
> This smells like a security vulnerability for most setups.
How do you figure? Surely your sensitive files aren't world-readable... /s
Let alone that probably all server implementations on Windows seem to have been a fork of BSD's original ftpd at some point, which had an RCE vulnerability when the password exceeded the limited bytelength of 256 bytes iirc.
Even software like ProFTPd where vulnerable over 30 years later.
Just writing this to make a point to stay the fuck away from FTP, because software is heavily outdated in that space and never updated to fix issues. Use ssh/sftp, always.
I will have to concede, though, that FTP servers in the real world are surprisingly awful. Even the supposedly easy task of spinning up an anonymous read-only FTP server to serve the current directory for five minutes, all permissions and security be damned, is annoyingly non-trivial.
(Unrelated to that awfulness, does anyone know how to get active FTP to pass through SLIRP networking on Qemu?)
Parse URL of form (per RFC 3986):
<type>://[<user>[:<password>]@]<host>[:<port>][/<path>]
XXX: this is not totally RFC 3986 compliant; <path> will have the
leading `/' unless it's an ftp:// URL, as this makes things easier
for file:// and http:// URLs. ftp:// URLs have the `/' between the
host and the URL-path removed, but any additional leading slashes
in the URL-path are retained (because they imply that we should
later do "CWD" with a null argument).
Examples:
input URL output path
--------- -----------
"http://host" "/"
"http://host/" "/"
"http://host/path" "/path"
"file://host/dir/file" "dir/file"
"ftp://host" ""
"ftp://host/" ""
"ftp://host//" "/"
"ftp://host/dir/file" "dir/file"
"ftp://host//dir/file" "/dir/file"
If we are dealing with a classic `[user@]host:[path]'
(urltype is CLASSIC_URL_T) then we have a raw directory
name (not encoded in any way) and we can change
directories in one step.
If we are dealing with an `ftp://host/path' URL
(urltype is FTP_URL_T), then RFC 3986 says we need to
send a separate CWD command for each unescaped "/"
in the path, and we have to interpret %hex escaping
*after* we find the slashes. It's possible to get
empty components here, (from multiple adjacent
slashes in the path) and RFC 3986 says that we should
still do `CWD ' (with a null argument) in such cases.
Many ftp servers don't support `CWD ', so if there's an
error performing that command, bail out with a descriptive
message.
Examples:
host: dir="", urltype=CLASSIC_URL_T
logged in (to default directory)
host:file dir=NULL, urltype=CLASSIC_URL_T
"RETR file"
host:dir/ dir="dir", urltype=CLASSIC_URL_T
"CWD dir", logged in
ftp://host/ dir="", urltype=FTP_URL_T
logged in (to default directory)
ftp://host/dir/ dir="dir", urltype=FTP_URL_T
"CWD dir", logged in
ftp://host/file dir=NULL, urltype=FTP_URL_T
"RETR file"
ftp://host//file dir="", urltype=FTP_URL_T
"CWD ", "RETR file"
host:/file dir="/", urltype=CLASSIC_URL_T
"CWD /", "RETR file"
ftp://host///file dir="/", urltype=FTP_URL_T
"CWD ", "CWD ", "RETR file"
ftp://host/%2F/file dir="%2F", urltype=FTP_URL_T
"CWD /", "RETR file"
ftp://host/foo/file dir="foo", urltype=FTP_URL_T
"CWD foo", "RETR file"
ftp://host/foo/bar/file dir="foo/bar"
"CWD foo", "CWD bar", "RETR file"
ftp://host//foo/bar/file dir="/foo/bar"
"CWD ", "CWD foo", "CWD bar", "RETR file"
ftp://host/foo//bar/file dir="foo//bar"
"CWD foo", "CWD ", "CWD bar", "RETR file"
ftp://host/%2F/foo/bar/file dir="%2F/foo/bar"
"CWD /", "CWD foo", "CWD bar", "RETR file"
ftp://host/%2Ffoo/bar/file dir="%2Ffoo/bar"
"CWD /foo", "CWD bar", "RETR file"
ftp://host/%2Ffoo%2Fbar/file dir="%2Ffoo%2Fbar"
"CWD /foo/bar", "RETR file"
ftp://host/%2Ffoo%2Fbar%2Ffile dir=NULL
"RETR /foo/bar/file"
Note that we don't need `dir' after this point.
The `CWD ' command (without a directory), which is required by
RFC 3986 to support the empty directory in the URL pathname (`//'),
conflicts with the server's conformance to RFC 959.Reminds a little bit of Java labels where you can do this:
public class Labels {
public static void main(String args[]){
https://hn.ycombinator.com
for(int i=0; i<10; i++){
System.out.println("......."+i );
}
}
}
and because that was still too boring they came up with ipv6
Larry's 1st Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon
Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon
A few months ago while writing a bot/crawler I searched for hours for something like this, but I found only full specs or just bits and pieces scattered around that used different terminology and/or had different opinions.
In the end I didn't even clearly understand what should be the max total URL length (e.g. mixed opinions here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maxim... - come on, a xGiB long URL?) => most of the time 2000 bytes is mentioned but it's not 100% clear.
Writing a bot made me understand 1) why browsers are so complicated and 2) that the Internet is a mess (e.g. once I even found a page that used multiple character encodings...).
My personal opinion is that everything is too lax. Browsers try to be the best ones by implementing workarounds for stuff that does not have (yet) or does not comply to a spec => this way it can only end up in a mess. A simple example is the HTTP-header "Content-Encoding" ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co... ) which I think should only indicate what kind of compression is being used, but I keep seeing in there stuff like "utf8"/"image/jpeg"/"base64"/"8bit"/"none"/"binary"/etc... and all those pages/files work perfectly in the browsers even if with those values they should actually be rejected... .
I guess what I’m getting at here is that the blame for the C-E weirdness lies in large part on the browsers, which could’ve made a clean break and improved the semantics at the same time by using T-E, but instead chose to initiate a chicken-and-egg dilemma out of a desire to support broken HTTP servers from the last century.
(The intended semantics is that C-E, an “end-to-end” header, says “this resource genuinely exists in this encoded form”, while T-E, a “hop-to-hop” header, says “the origin or proxy server you’re using incidentally chose to encode this resource in this form”; this is why sometimes the wrong combination of hacks in the HTTP server and the Web browser will lead you to downloading a tar file when you expected a tar.gz file.)
The use of “gzip” as the compression is also a wart, because it’s “deflate” (which is what you want: DEFLATE compression with a checksum) with a useless decompressed filename (wat?) + decompressed mtime (double wat?) header stacked on top.
(There is a mandatory MTIME which is included, and an OS byte, but those only waste 5 bytes total. Far less than gzip will typically save.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_Resource_Ide...
Uh, no. "%:)" is not <"%" HEXDIG HEXDIG> nor is % allowed outside of that. (Although your browser will likely accept it)
> This includes spaces, and the following two URLs lead to the same file located in a directory that's named " ": > https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls/ /f > https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls/%20/f > Your client may automatically percent-encode the space, but e.g., curl(1) lets you send the raw space:
Uh, no. Just because one of your clients is wrong and some servers allow it doesn't mean it's allowed by the spec.
In fact, the HTTP/1.1 RFC defers to RFC2396 for the meaning of <abs_path>: <path_segments> which begin with a /.
What is <path_segments>? A bunch of slash-delimited <segment>s.
What is <segment>? A bunch of <pchar> and maybe a semicolon.
What is <pchar>? <unreserved>, <escaped>, or some special characters (not including space).
What is <unreserved>? Letters, digits, and some special characters (not including space).
What is <escaped>? <"%" hex hex>.
Most HTTP clients and servers are pretty forgiving about what they accept, because other people do broken stuff, like sending them literal spaces. But that doesn't mean it's "allowed", that doesn't mean every server allows it, and that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
> That is, if your web server supports (and has enabled) user directories, and you submit a request for "~username": [it does stuff]
Uh, no. If you're using Apache, that might be true. As you mentioned, this is implementation-defined (as are all pathnames).
> Now with all of this long discussion, let's go back to that silly URL from above: ... Now this really looks like the Buffalo buffalo equivalent of a URL.
Not really.
> Now we start to play silly tricks: "⁄ ⁄www.netmeister.org" uses the fraction slash characters
You are aware that URLs predate Unicode, right? Not to mention that Unicode lookalike characters are a Unicode (or UI) problem, not a URL problem?
> The next "https" now is the hostname component of the authority: a partially qualified hostname, that relies on /etc/hosts containing an entry pointing https to the right IP address.
Or on a search domain (which could be configured locally, or through GPO on Windows, or through DHCP!). Or maybe your resolver has a local zone for it. Or maybe ...
foo|foo -foo 's^foo^foo^'"">foo 2>>foo
is not a very good example for teaching the structure of the the command line.
Pick a better one.
It's simple.
Complicated doesn’t mean “new to me.” If I haven’t read a man page, that doesn’t mean the command is complicated.
So it's not complicated to you... what made you want to share this?
> com·pli·cat·ed | ˈkämpləˌkādəd |
> adjective
> 1 consisting of many interconnecting parts or elements
Worth noting from the article:
> And this is one of the main take-aways here: while the URL specification prescribes or allows one thing, different clients and servers behave differently.
[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=841105