Is it possible to automate FTP in Terminal?

I want to add an FTP command to my crontab to automatically download a file. How do I do this?

The easier way to do this is with wget. For example:

Ian-Cs-MacBook-Pro:ianc ian$ wget ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/welcome.msg
--2011-08-02 19:48:00--  ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/welcome.msg
           => `welcome.msg'
Resolving gnjilux.cc.fer.hr... 161.53.74.67
Connecting to gnjilux.cc.fer.hr|161.53.74.67|:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done.    ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done.  ==> CWD not needed.
==> SIZE welcome.msg ... 1462
==> PASV ... done.    ==> RETR welcome.msg ... done.
Length: 1462 (1.4K) (unauthoritative)

100% [======================================================================================================================================================================================================================================>] 1,462       --.-K/s   in 0s      

2011-08-02 19:48:03 (63.4 MB/s) - `welcome.msg' saved [1462]

wget supports options to supply a user name (--user=user) and password (--password=password) if anonymous FTP access isn't available. And a --quiet mode so it's cron-friendly and doesn't fill up your local inbox without messages for successful downloads.

The BASH script below will work

#!/bin/bash

remotefile="/path/to/ftp/server/file.png"
hostname="ftp.server.net"
username="ftpuser"
password="ftppass"
ftp -in $hostname<<EOF
quote USER $username
quote PASS $password

binary
get $remotefile $HOME/temp/file.png
quit
EOF

You may use curl which is available under Mac OSX already and can (for non-anonymous ftp) use logins stored in .netrc (so the password doesn't show up in a ps listing)

Plain vanilla anonymous ftp

curl ftp://your.server.name/path/to/file.tar.gz > ~you/Downloads/file.tar.gz

Using .netrc

curl --netrc ftp://your.server.name/path/to/file.tar.gz > ~you/Downloads/file.tar.gz

Specify user/password directly (visible in ps afterwards)

curl --user "user:password" ftp://your.server.name/path/to/file.tar.gz > ~you/Downloads/file.tar.gz