I forgot to point out that by using this method (passing a list of commands to the OS's standard FTP program) you make error-handling a whole lot more difficult. With Net::FTP you can check for errors programatically after each step, and abort as soon as something fails. With this method you end up running all the commands, even if the very first (or even the login) fails, which generates a huge pile of spurious errors. Then you need to capture the output from the ftp program (into a file, or pipe it in) then parse it for strings that look like errors - usually but not always a three-digit code at the start of a line... SFTP is even worse...

I think I've successfully argued against my own solution - so make best efforts to find/install Net::FTP before resorting to this way!