A process that sends commands and receives responses. Note that in GridFTP, the client may or may not take part in the actual movement of data.

A process that receives commands and sends responses to those commands. Since it is a server or service, and it receives commands, it must be listening on a port somewhere to receive the commands. Both FTP and GridFTP have IANA registered ports. For FTP it is port 21, for GridFTP it is port 2811. This is normally handled via inetd or xinetd on Unix variants. However, it is also possible to implement a daemon that listens on the specified port. This is described more fully in in the Architecture section of the GridFTP Developer's Guide.