using wild card characters for file handling in ftp

Question

Is there any linux equivalent for file handling with wildcards in a ftp server?

Say I have files for a date 20120520 which i want to delete at once

Can something of this sort be done in an FTP server:

    delete *20120520*

which will delete any/all files of that date in the ftp server directory.

I mean there are always ways of deleting old files in FTP , but just wanted to know if any wild card feature exist for FTP, this would make tasks simpler

Thanks.

Answer 1

FTP protocol doesn't support operations with wildcards. Different FTP servers can have their own rules regarding this, i.e. they can support wildcards, but this makes little sense (only deletion can be done via FTP with wildcards) so I doubt that any server actually supports them.

Answer 2

As far as I know, lftp supports wildcards and many other bash feature, as bash completion. It's a very powerful tool.

Try it out, I'm not sure it works in the way you want to use it, but I know it supports wildcards.