A bit of caution from personal experience:

Net::FTP does work, but it's a bit limited. Net::FTP::Recursive solves a few of the problems, but not all. I just had a case where I was fetching 16000+ small (8-15Kbytes) files from a WinNT server on a network with varying loads to a FreeBSD server on which the script resides. It took several hours with Net::FTP and failed to fetch a number of files. It was trying to create a new connection for each file transfer, and timing out with 'Unable to close connection' as its warning on STDERR.

When I manually FTP'd the files, the mget operation took less than 15 minutes, and all the files came across. Seeing this, I dug into man ftp. In there, I discovered (actually, rediscovered: I had done this before on an embedded system) that you can have ftp read its login and command sequence from a file.

From Perl:

  use strict;
  use warnings;
# ...
  chdir('/path/to/put/files/in');
  system('ftp', '-N', 'mystartfile', 'ftp.server.com') && die "FTP FAI
+LURE: $!\n";
  chdir('/where/I/was/before');
# ...
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the file mystartfile:

machine ftp.server.com
login me
password somesillypw
binary
cd /path/to/fetch/from
mget *
bye
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This code has your Perl program waiting for completion of the FTP transfer. If this is not necessary, write the system command like so:

system('ftp -N mystartfile ftp.server.com &') && die "Couldn't start f
+tp transfer: $!\n";
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