Well, about 45 minutes into getting URI to properly break down an ftp URL and making it work with Net::FTP::Scalar I was digging through LWP::* trying to find an example of using $uri->path_segments(). I found a good example. In fact I found exactly what I was trying to do. Then I realized: LWP::Simple supports FTP.

I should have known..after all this is Perl. perl -e 'use LWP::Simple qw(get); print(get("ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt"));' Staunch