hi

i originally posted this under linux - newbies, but maybe it's better off here. the issue as i see it is probably not related specificaaly to freebsd, but rather to my lack of *nix knowledge

i host on a shared freebsd webserver. i am able to ftp a zip file onto the server, but do not know how to extract it.

there does not seem to be an unzip programme in the \bin directory, so i downloaded unzip from info-zip.org and was able to ftp it onto the server.

how do i go about installing it and running it on freebsd (i have not worked with any flavour of unix before).

the hosting co. does not provide telnet or ssh access. i can only use ftp, but when i use the command "unzip" through ftp this obviously does not work.

please help!

thanks

You can't install anything through FTP (without violating your service contract and possibly the law). You also can't run a command like unzip from within FTP.

What you need to do is ask the hosting company to install unzip (doesn't seem like an unreasonable request) or consider compressing your data with gzip. Then once you have your data on the server, you'll have to create a cron job (assuming you have that facility) or create a PHP/CGI script that you can call with your browser that unzips the file for you.

HTH

It looks very serious, but it just means that FTP protocol is for file transfer - not for remote access and it simply doesn't allow you to run programs.