Using the LIST command with a wildcard on Vista's FTP server

Lately, I’ve been working on code that fetches EDI files from and FTP server using a VM running Windows XP. But yesterday rather than go through a VM I decided to use Vista’s FTP server for testing which turned out to be a bad idea.

I’m new to this code base so I’ve been stepping through it to see how it works and immediately started having problems where the app failed to download files off the server. The code is based on edtFTPnet source so I started stepping through it to see what was going on and found it uses FTP’s LIST command as follows "LIST *.NS". That all seemed fine but I never got any results back. After double checking that the expected files were really there I jumped to the command line to test things out. In my first test I ran into the fact that LIST isn’t supported from Windows FTP.EXE command line tool since it requires PASV mode. That’s ok I’ll just use the DIR command:

No dice. While a plain DIR command works, specifying a wildcard of "*.NS" failed! What’s up with that? I fire up my XP VM and this works just fine under XP. It turns out this is a bug in Windows Vista’s FTP server. Thanks Noel for finding that link. Btw, we both got a nice laugh over the suggested workaround:

"To work around this problem, do not use an FTP LIST command together with a file mask argument."

Yeah, thanks that’s a big help. On a side note, I just found out the broker our client is exchanging EDI files with is switching FTP server software, I just hope it’s not to Windows Vista.