use Net::Lite::FTP;
my $tlsftp=Net::Lite::FTP->new();
$tlsftp->open("ftp.tls.pl","21");
$tlsftp->user("user");
$tlsftp->pass("password");
$tlsftp->cwd("sth");
my $files=$tlsftp->list("nok*");
foreach $f (@$files) {
 print "Getting file: $f\n";
 $tlsftp->get($f);
};
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This assumes FTP servers support wildcards, when there were exploits for wildcards in the wild, some FTP servers would turn off this feature, thus, you would like to list all the files and then grep it on client side - this might require some memory if the list is large. (if you know that full list is too big to fit in memory, but your wildcarded list fits fine, you can try grepp-ing the list on-line).

If the list is really huge, and even your smaller list wouldn't fit in memory, you would need two FTP connections - one for list, and the other for files.

use Net::FTP;

$ftp = Net::FTP->new($host, Debug => 0)
             or die "Cannot connect to $host $@";

$ftp->login($user_name,$password)
             or die "Cannot login ", $ftp->message;

$ftp->cwd($target_dir)
             or die "Cannot cd to $target_dir", 
                    $ftp->message;
my @files = $ftp->ls('nok*');

for (@files) {
   $ftp->get($_)
             or die "couldn't get $_", $ftp->message;
   ... do something with the file ...
}

$ftp->quit;
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I presume that you are using Net::FTP, but this isn't clear. Please post more of your code.

To answer your specific question, you want to use the nlst or list methods, and read the file names individually from the dataconn object that these methods return.

machine foo.network-lynx.net
login don
password zebra
macdef init
cd /usr/local/test_data/reports
binary
mget *599*
exit
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system("ftp -in -N /var/web/scripts/netrc don@foo.network-lynx.net") 
       && die "Couldn't complete netrc ftp! $!\n";
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