Sounds like an awful lot of work for a problem with a myriad of solutions. What about Rsync and
File::Rsync The August issue of sysadmin has an article about using rsync w/ ssh. There are also quite a few tutorials on the web.
Ted
--
"That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson