Most Catfood Software products are the result of an itch I couldn't find a way to scratch. Sometimes I write software just to learn something new. Often I do it because there is no other product that does exactly what I need, or it's going to be faster to write it than search for it.
Catfood FTP is the very first Catfood Software product - 1.00 was released in 1998. File Transfer Protocol is a standard for moving files between computers. It's commonly used for updating websites. Back in 1998 I was working on Catfood Magazine and needed to send changes to our host at Demon Internet. This was a slow dial-up connection to a UNIX host so as well as sending the files I also needed to chmod scripts so that they had permission to run.
I couldn't find any software that really made life easier, so Catfood FTP was born. I wrote it as a command line tool that simply uploaded an entire directory structure. To help with the slow dial-up connection I added an option to only send files that have the archive bit set - this is a flag that Windows sets whenever a file is changed. Catfood FTP clears it after upload, so after uploading a site you only need to send the files that have actually changed. I also added chmod support based on extension, so you could for instance automatically set the right permissions for Perl scripts.
Over the years Catfood FTP has added support for downloading files, scripting, excluding or included specific file types and more. From version 3.00 there's also a Wizard that makes it easy to run a quick transfer or to configure a script that can be automated in a scheduled task.
I use Catfood FTP daily. It's still my tool of choice for updating websites and I also use it for automatic daily backup of several databases from my web host. The command line version is free and included in the Catfood FTP Wizard download. The Wizard is a free trial (for twenty transfers) and if you find it useful you can buy a license at the Catfood Store.