FTPflow is a Python package for optimally traversing extremely large FTP directory trees. It constitutes the algorithmic heart of the Airport search engine. FTPflow creates a dictionary formatted as a JSON file in the user’s home directory containing all the full paths as keys and the respective filenames as values. FTPflow is designed with speed in mind by utilizing state-of-the-art high performance parallelism and concurrency algorithms to traverse FTP directory trees. The resultant hash table (i.e., dictionary) supports fast lookup for any file in any biological database.
