To monitor the progress of a transfer, it can be useful to enter the hash command before the transfer. This instructs ftp to print a `#' character for every 1024 bytes of data received. So long as a # appears every so often, the ftp is still in progress, and there are no problems.

ftp> hash Hash mark printing on (1024 bytes/hash mark). ftp> get paper.txt 200 PORT command okay. 150 Opening data connection for paper.txt (0.50.50.54,1322). ################# 226 Transfer complete. 16494 bytes sent in 0.98 seconds (16 Kbytes/s) ftp>

The file transferred in this example was 15788 bytes in length, which with communication overheads was transferred in 16494 bytes. This causes 17 # marks to be printed.