That was quick. I checked Net::FTP to find that there is a message method to return the ftp server response. This method is inherited by MVS::JESFTP. It gave me what I wanted. Thank you so much. For those who use MVS::JESFTP, after every FTP command you can use MVS::JESFTP->message (or say $jes->message where $jes is the object) which returns an array of lines. Currently MVS::JESFTP checks held output for jobname. It can be easily modified to check on jobnumber, which is more accurate. Happy New Year all!!