While this isn't necessarily a perlized solution, you might
find some useful information if you look into the
libs
originally written for MidnightCommander which has since been
sucked into gnome.
is an attempt to give a single
programming interface to a variety of file systems.
One of the filesystems which I know they have been working on
is a FS over FTP.
I used to think that I knew it all,
then I started to listen.