Simple function to use ncftpget for FTP downloads behind a firewall.

Requires ncftpget and a properly formatted config file in the users home directory

download_file(url, filename, method)

Arguments

url

complete URL for file download

filename

destination file name

method

Method of file retrieval. Can set this using the options(download.ftp.method=[method]) in your Rprofile. example options(download.ftp.method="ncftpget")

Author

Shawn Serbin, Rob Kooper

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
download_file("http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/csb/ch11b.txt","~/test.download.txt")

download_file("
  ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/Datasets/NARR/monolevel/pres.sfc.2000.nc",
  "~/pres.sfc.2000.nc")
} # }