Not reliably but some ftp daemons may have the ability to. The 'ls' and 'dir' commands in the ftp client, are basically just commands that tells the client to ask the server for a directory listing; I'm not sure if the extra (usually ls -l style) information is required.
Here's a test that finds the last 4 files in a directory, *if* they were created in the present or previous month:
Code:
Terry@dixie$ ftp -a ftp.freebsd.org << END | grep -E "`date -v -1m +%b`|`date +%b`" | tail -n 4 | sort
cd pub/FreeBSD
ls
quit
END
-rw-r--r-- 1 110 1002 51703 Apr 26 05:32 dir.sizes
-rw-r--r-- 1 110 1002 25830058 Apr 26 05:07 ls-lR.gz
drwxrwxr-x 7 110 1002 512 Apr 05 18:37 snapshots
drwxrwxr-x 10 110 1002 512 Mar 14 09:29 ports
Terry@dixie$
The grep and sort commands should really be replaced by a filter script, that understands how to collate/sort the entries into the order of months, e.g. Jan before Feb, March before Apr, etc. My suggestion would be Perl or AWK.
There's probably a few Perl modules on CPAN that can, and virtually every script language that supports arrays could pull off the task. (I would probably use AWK and a hand written look up table, but I'm to busy to check CPAN right now)