A command line ftp client is good for many things. You can turn off prompting, and use mget with wildcard to get many files. The problem is that mget doesn’t create directories locally, so when it tries to recurse into destination directories in order to place incoming files into them, it fails. We can use wget instead to traverse the directory structure, create folders, and download

# wget -r 'ftp://username:password@ftp.example.com'

Note: rsync would be ideal for this, but there are some cases where the source only offers ftp as a connection protocol.