American Community Survey (ACS)

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Downloads / FTP Server

The main directory of the Comparison Study’s ftp server (/ftp/acs/downloads/acsc2k/), contains a documentation subdirectory, and 26 state subdirectories with two-character postal abbreviations as directory names. There are only directories for states that contain one or more ACS test counties.

The documentation subdirectory (/docs) contains documentation explained in the "1ReadMe" file. The 1ReadMe file is available in main directory on the ftp server. It is available in 3 formats.

Inside the state directories you will find a directory for each ACS test county. For example, the data for Jefferson County, Arkansas, is in directory AR/Jefferson_County.

The naming convention of files within the county-level directories can be broken down into three parts, first the file purpose, secondly a 5-digit numeric geography code (the first two digits are state FIPS codes and the last 3 digits are county FIPS codes) and lastly a file extension. Files that have the extension *.csv are spreadsheet-ready ASCII files and files that have the extension of *. sas7bdat are SAS version 8 data sets.

For more information on the files and their purposes refer to the ReadMe.doc in the main directory on the FTP site.

  » Go to the FTP Server

About the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Application

This FTP (File Transfer Protocol) application is intended for users of Census data. It provides quick access to Census data and allows data users to copy files from the Census Web site to their computer.

FTP File Transfer

To facilitate transferring files, we suggest using features commonly found in most FTP utilities. When testing the FTP application in a PC environment, we used the ws_ftp product by the Ipswitch Inc. This product, and many other FTP products developed for the PC environment, allow individual or multiple file selections using the control key or block multiple file selections using the shift key.

In the UNIX environment, the "mget" command allows the transferring of single or multiple files. Using the ftp command mget, followed by a single filename, will allow a single file to be downloaded. Using the command mget followed by a wildcard character such as *, or *.* , allows multiple files to be downloaded. For example, once you have navigated into the Three Year Averages FTP site, you can download all of the files in a directory with the following ftp commands:

     ftp>binary            (set file transfer mode to binary)
     ftp>prompt off     (to avoid being asked for verification of each file, optional)
     ftp>mget *.*        (to copy multiple files)
     ftp>quit                (to exit ftp)