 <blockquote> <p>Is there any way to do this for a standard FTP server?</p> </blockquote> <p>No. You can tell the server the position where it should start with the <code>REST</code> (restart) command, but you cannot tell it how much data it should send. All you can do is close the data channel after you've received the amount of data you want. The FTP server will probably complain about this because it received a RST (writing against a closed socket) but in most cases this should not cause problems.</p>