I thought of that, but haven't been able to find a way to run it over the ftp connection.
if i run it locally (@list = stat(FILEHANDLE);)its gonna give me an error because the file is on the remort server. i would have to run it like @list = stat($ftp->get($filename)); .. but that would cause me to retrieve the file, not what i am looking for.
According the the Net:FTP docs Stat is the FTP stat command, which returns the server status, not of a specific file. (and its not implimented yet from what i can tell)