Recommended console ftp clients
To my mind, the most powerful command-line ftp client is undoubtly lftp.
- it allows one to use standard shell command over the ftp wire
- It provides up/down queue for long operations
Check if Midnight Commander (mc) is installed. If so, you can do ftp from there.
You could make life really easy for yourself using a fuse filessytem.
On the machine you can ssh into, install curlftpfs
sudo apt-get install curlftpfs
Then add yourself to group fuse
sudo usermod -aG fuse <username>
Log out, and log back in again, for changes to take effect.
Make a directory for a mount point
mkdir ~/ftp
Then mount the ftp server as a local filesystem
curlftpfs ftp.server.com ~/ftp -o user=<ftp_username>
Enter the password when prompted.
You can then use the remote ftp servers files as if they appear on the local server. Allowing you to use cp, rsync etc without the hassle of handling ftp.
Read the man page for more information
Especially useful if you do a lot of this sort of thing.