So if you're looking at the output from a BSD derived ftpd, a few notes. That used to be just fork and exec "ls -l", and that was slow, so ls.c was copied into

So if you're looking at the output from a BSD derived ftpd, a few notes. That used to be just fork and exec "ls -l", and that was slow, so ls.c was copied into src/ftpd. But it's literally the same code. Whatever ls prints, that's what ftpd prints. But the client parsing code is mostly strsep() and cross your fingers and hope to die. It's not terribly robust. Like if you were writing a program, you would not prefer parsing the output of ls to running stat yourself.