Proxy in linux

IS there any way to configure the proxy to access the internet in linux without using the browser. Reason is i want to connect to ftp via console from my linux system, how can i use it with http proxy configured via webbrowser?

What proxy are you using? All a proxy does is say that traffic coming in on port x gets forwarded to destination y. It should be possible to forward FTP requests.

Perhaps you should consider using a tool like wget, for which is easy to configure proxys. If you need a username / password for your proxy then wget supports them as well.

Thanks Andrew,
But is there any universal way to set or configure that proxy host and port to linux machine such that i dont need to configure that in every application.(a place like in /etc/profile)

The link I provided showed how to set an environmental variable that wget understands and other applications may do as well¹. As such, you could easily put that environmental variable into your /etc/profile file(s).

Note ¹: It is up to individual applications whether to handle such "advisory" environmental variables. If the application chooses not to do anything with the advice, you may be stuck².

Note ²: I suppose you might be able to get around such a problem by creating your own Socks proxy (which would then point to the real proxy) on the Linux client box, and then "SOCKify" the command line application to force it to use your Socks proxy. Personally I would not do this - I would ensure that I used a command line tool that uses the main proxy from the beginning.