In theory, FTP time-stamping works much the same as HTTP, only FTP has no headers--time-stamps must be received from the directory listings.
For each directory files must be retrieved from, Wget will use the
LIST command to get the listing. It will try to analyze the
listing, assuming that it is a Unix ls -l listing, and extract
the time-stamps. The rest is exactly the same as for HTTP.
Assumption that every directory listing is a Unix-style listing may sound extremely constraining, but in practice it is not, as many non-Unix FTP servers use the Unixoid listing format because most (all?) of the clients understand it. Bear in mind that RFC959 defines no standard way to get a file list, let alone the time-stamps. We can only hope that a future standard will define this.
Another non-standard solution includes the use of MDTM command
that is supported by some FTP servers (including the popular
wu-ftpd), which returns the exact time of the specified file.
Wget may support this command in the future.
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