Monks, I bow to your Buddha Nature.

I have written a script to generate a web page that lists the contents of an FTP site. It has to recurse through all the directories and sub directories like so: 
#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Net::FTP;

my $ftp = Net::FTP->new("ftp address here");

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<html><title>FTP Contents</title><center><Head>The Tank FTP Lis
+t</head></
print "<body bgcolor=black>";

if($ftp->login("username",'password')){
        lister(0);
}
else{
        print "FTP: Failed to login";
}
$ftp->quit;
print "</body></html>";


#------Subroutines------------

sub lister{
        my $lev = $_[0];
        my @dirs;
        my @files;
        my @dirarray = $ftp->ls();
        foreach my $item(@dirarray){
                if($ftp->cwd($item)){
                        $ftp->cdup();
                        push @dirs,$item;
                }
                else{
                        push @files,$item;
                }
        }
        my $buff="&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp" x $lev;
        foreach my $dirs(@dirs){
                print "<font color=yellow>$buff\|_ $dirs</font><br>";
                $ftp->cwd($dirs);
                lister($lev+1);

        }
        foreach my $file(@files){
                print "<font color=lime>$buff\|_ $file</font><br>";
        }
        $ftp->cdup();
}

[download]
As you can see it basically takes the contents of a directory and puts them in either a directory array or a file array. It differentiates between the two by checking to see if the FTP->cwd("tested item") (change directory) works. It then takes everything in the directory array and recursivly calls itself on that directory. As is it works fine, but for large sites (4000+ files and driectores) it takes a LONG time, and is quite server transaction intensive. Is there a better way to do this? I looked in the NET::FTP docs and I don't see anything that really fits the bill. I would like to know if there is a way to read file attributes on an FTP site. Any one?

In reply to A better way to recurse FTP directories by Snuggle

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