The fact that in this particular case $! contains something that might look like the right error message doesn't mean the other procedures will be able to use it as well.

The list of errors that can be found in $! is fixed (and OS dependant). You can find out what it is by

$lastmsg='noNSensE';
$i = 0;
$! = $i;
while ($lastmsg ne $!) {
   $lastmsg = ''.$!;
   print "$i: $!\n";
   $i++;
   $! = $i;
}
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Try also:

$! = "Hello world";
print "$!\n";
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So as you see it is possible to change the $!, but you can't give a very specific error message.

What GhodMode wants is

$ftp->message()
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Of course that doesn't work for the "new Net::FTP", but that was not requested.

Jenda

Once again, I am reminded to read the docs on Net::Cmd...

So then something like this would work nicely, huh?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::FTP;
my $ftp = Net::FTP->new("some.host.name") or die "Server not found!\n"
+;
$ftp->login("anonymous",'me@here.there') or die $ftp->message();
$ftp->cwd("/pub") or die $ftp->message();
$ftp->get("that.file") or die $ftp->message();
$ftp->quit;
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