So apparently Apple has (stupidly) dropped support for "insecure" Unix commands such as telnet , ftp , etc. in 10.13, or "High Sierra" (see these threads for more info). Unfortunately, I use Dired as an ftp client to lists.gnu.org. So, to compensate for the loss of BSD's ftp , I installed the GNU inetutils from homebrew:

brew install inetutils

However, GNU's ftp seems to behave quite differently. For starters, I now have to explicitly provide a username and "password" and turn on passive mode. For example:

C-x C-f /ftp:ftp@lists.gnu.org: ftp> open lists.gnu.org open lists.gnu.org Connected to lists.gnu.org. 220 Welcome to lists.gnu.org MBOX FTP service. ftp> ls ls 530 Please login with USER and PASS. 530 Please login with USER and PASS. 530 Please login with USER and PASS. ftp> user ftp user ftp 331 Please specify the password. Password: my@email.com 230 Login successful. ftp> ls ls 500 Illegal PORT command. 500 Unknown command. ftp> passive passive Passive mode on. ftp> ls ls 227 Entering Passive Mode (208,118,235,17,81,10). 150 Here comes the directory listing. drwxr-xr-x 2 500 500 4096 Mar 08 2012 123tkshop-announce drwxr-xr-x 2 500 500 4096 Jan 08 2007 123tkshop-bugs drwxr-xr-x 2 500 500 4096 Jan 05 2007 123tkshop-devoloper ... 226 Directory send OK. ftp>

Previously, with BSD's ftp , all of this login stuff would automatically happen when I tried to connect.

Yet even though ls now works in the ftp command prompt, I cannot get a Dired buffer for the remote host. Even after I've logged in (as above), when I try to run find-file on /ftp:ftp@lists.gnu.org: I get the following errors in *Messages* :

Getting PWD... [8 times] tramp-file-name-handler: Unable to obtain CWD

And I see the following in the ftp command prompt:

ftp> pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd pwd 257 "/" ftp> 257 "/" ftp> 257 "/" ftp> 257 "/" ftp> 257 "/" ftp> 257 "/" ftp> 257 "/" ftp> 257 "/" ftp>

And I get no Dired buffer for the remote host.

So my question is: How can I use Dired to interact with ftp hosts on OS X 10.13?

PS:

I noticed that these issues do not occur in Emacs on Ubuntu. And for good measure, I copied BSD's ftp from another Mac and verified that none of these issues occur when I use that instead of GNU's ftp .

I am using Emacs 25.3 (on both my OS X and Ubuntu systems).