thanks for your replies,
indeed, shell is initialised in the directory where pd has been started and when i send it some ls/pwd i can see the file. downloading instead of uploading (using similar command lines) leads to same problems more or less.
i will try to call the command from a script then.
+! aym3ric.
to me it looks rather like a problem with the file ftp.png itself; are you sure the file is found ? (as i remember the [shell] defaults to some unexpected(?) home-directory - like "/" or "~") does it work when you try to *get* something from the ftp ?
and of course there might be a problem with the quotes.
I normally use shell to call shellscripts. This way you can get rid of Pd's parsing problem and actually implement what you want to do in a scripting language of your choice. At the same time you can get rid of unwanted output from the commands that you call.
The default directory of shell is the directory where you started pd. (Not the directory of the patch ... which is a bit ugly).
Guenter