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There are numerous commercial, shareware, and
freeware ftp applications to simplify transferring files with ftp.
Most of these applications provide a means to monitor the file
transfer, some as a numeric counter and others with a graphical
status indicator. The indicator can help you detect a hung
connection before it times out.

The FTP console command is a free, no-frills
alternative to these applications and can be particularly useful if
you seldom use ftp other than from Internet Explorer or another
browser.

Although the FTP console command doesn’t
display a status indicator by default, you can turn on an option to
display hash marks to indicate transfer status. To do so, first
initiate the ftp session with the FTP command. Then, at the ftp
command prompt, type the command HASH and press enter. This
command works as a toggle. If hashing is off (which is the
default), executing the HASH command turns it on. When the command
is on, the FTP session displays a # character for each buffer
transferred.