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Using FIle FIlters in FileZilla

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc.

FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters- located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in ".php".
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Leonard King said…
Thank you for creating this post. I've been trying to figure out how to filter files in FileZilla for ages, and your post is the first documentation I've seen that actually explains how to do it. You've just sped up a rather time consuming and fiddly job 10-fold.
March 30, 2010 at 8:36 PM
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