D. J. Bernstein
Internet publication
FTP: File Transfer Protocol
The LIST and NLST verbs

Easily Parsed LIST Format

An EPLF response to LIST is a series of lines, each line specifying one file. Each line contains
  1. a plus sign (\053);
  2. a series of facts about the file;
  3. a tab (\011);
  4. an abbreviated pathname; and
  5. \015\012.
Note that the terminating \015\012 does not depend on the binary flag.

Each fact is zero or more bytes of information, terminated by a comma and not containing any tabs. Facts may appear in any order. Each fact appears at most once.

Facts have the general format xy, where x is one of the following strings:

Further facts may be defined in the future to support other client operations. Servers are permitted to use new facts; clients must skip unrecognized facts.

Examples

Here is a typical EPLF response, with \011 displayed as a space, and with \015\012 at the end of each line:
     +i8388621.48594,m825718503,r,s280, djb.html
     +i8388621.50690,m824255907,/, 514
     +i8388621.48598,m824253270,r,s612, 514.html
An EPLF-aware client (in the Pacific time zone) might display the following human-readable listing:
                         Tue Feb 13 15:58:27 1996   514/
             612 bytes   Tue Feb 13 15:14:30 1996   514.html
             280 bytes   Fri Mar  1 14:15:03 1996   djb.html

More examples:

     +/,m824255907,i!#@$%^&*(), 514
     +r,up644, This file name has spaces, commas, etc.
     +up000, secret

Sample code

The following C function takes a pointer to a string containing one line of an EPLF response. It assumes that the original response did not contain \000, and that the trailing \015\012 has been replaced by \000. It returns a pointer to the filename, or 0 if the line does not appear to be an EPLF response.
     char *eplf_name(char *line)
     {
       if (*line != 43) return 0;
       while (*line) if (*line++ == 9) return line;
       return 0;
     }
The following C function takes a pointer to a string containing one line of an EPLF response as above, and prints a human-readable listing. It assumes that the local character set is ASCII, that file modification times fit into a local time_t, and that file sizes fit into a local unsigned long. It also assumes that time_t is interpreted as a number of seconds since the beginning of 1970 GMT. (A more portable function could use mktime() to discover the time_t representation of 1970 GMT.) Note that its output is not machine-readable, since the file name might contain the local newline sequence.
     #include <time.h>

     int eplf_readable(char *line)
     {
       int flagcwd = 0;
       time_t when = 0;
       int flagsize = 0;
       unsigned long size;
       if (*line++ != '+') return 0;
       while (*line)
         switch (*line) {
           case '\t':
             if (flagsize) printf("%10lu bytes   ",size);
             else printf("                   ");
             if (when) printf("%24.24s",ctime(&when));
             else printf("                        ");
             printf("   %s%s\n",line + 1,flagcwd ? "/" : "");
             return 1;
           case 's':
             flagsize = 1;
             size = 0;
             while (*++line && (*line != ','))
               size = size * 10 + (*line - '0');
             break;
           case 'm':
             while (*++line && (*line != ','))
               when = when * 10 + (*line - '0');
             break;
           case '/':
             flagcwd = 1;
           default:
             while (*line) if (*line++ == ',') break;
         }
       return 0;
     }

Design principles

EPLF was designed to
  1. reliably communicate the information needed by clients;
  2. make client and server implementation as easy as possible; and
  3. be readable to humans, when readability does not complicate implementations.
Modification times are expressed as second counters rather than calendar dates and times, for example, because second counters are much easier to generate and parse, making it more likely that browsers will display times in the viewer's time zone and native language.

I designed EPLF in March 1996. The documentation was improved by suggestions from Scott Schwartz and Benjamin Riefenstahl.