front-end of libcurl

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Sep-2006, Alexander Barth wrote:

| Hi all,
| 
| I wrote a front-end of libcurl to download files from a web or ftp server. 
This syntax is quite
| straight forward:
| 
| download('url','localfile');
| 
| The error handling is similar to the copyfile function in matlab.
| The attached source can be compiled with:
| 
| mkoctfile download.cc `curl-config --cflags --libs`
| 
| This function may be useful for the package manager. Like rpm is able to 
install a package from a
| web-server (for example: rpm -ihv http://example.com/package.rpm), a similar 
functionality could be
| added to pkg.m
| 
| I would be glad if this function would be considered for inclusion in octave 
or octave-forge. If
| octave-forge turns out to be the appropriate place, I can add it myself, 
maybe in main/miscellaneous.
| 

Yes, I think it would be useful to have this functionality.  Probably
it would be best to have an interface taht is compatible with the
urlread and urlwrite functions from Matlab.  Also, for inclusion with
Octave it would help for the code to match the style of the rest of
Octave.

Also, Matlab has a collection of ftp functions.  Does libcurl provide
the functionality needed to implement those features?  The ftp
functions available in Matlab are

 ascii   binary  cd      close   delete  dir
 ftp     mget    mkdir   mput    rename  rmdir

jwe