How to get BSD FTP and Telnet back in 10.13 (High Sierra)?

Solution 1:

Apple's Telnet and FTP programs are back in High Sierra thanks to this homebrew pull request (by yours truly). Both the client and server of each one are back, and these are Apple's original versions of these programs.

inetutils unfortunately exhibits some bugs on High Sierra so this will be a better solution and should make everyone happy.

To install ALL the formulas in that PR, run this at the command line:

brew install tnftp tnftpd telnet telnetd

Of course you can install each of these separately as well:

# TNFTP client & server (formerly known as LukeMFTP, presumably due to being developed by Luke Mewburn 
# and has been the default FTP for default FTP client included with NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, 
# Darwin (macOS), and MidnightBSD):
brew install tnftp 
brew install tnftpd 

# Telnet client & server:
brew install telnet 
brew install telnetd

Solution 2:

Using Homebrew:

brew install inetutils

This will restore telnet, ftp, etc...

Can't believe Apple removed such a fundamental utilities from the command line.