ncftp is just the best way to do big ftp transfers. I've used this for a while and I already knew that it knows how to do wildcards and filename completion. Last night I wanted to download ISO images of Red Hat 8.0. I was working on my laptop with an ssh connection to a desktop machine with oodles of disk storage, but I didn't want to leave my laptop on for the download of three cd images, each >600MB, so I read the ncftp manual. It turns out you can use a command bgget to place downloads in a queue. Then, when you're ready for it all to start, use bgstart which starts the downloads in the background. Exit your ncftp session, close ssh and laptop. Go to sleep. Wake up in the morning to find that everything downloaded successfully!