After checking that your original file is not in fact empty as mentioned previously, Try doing the following: <c>my $ftp = Net::FTP->new("$home, Debug => 1")<\c>

You can then see in pretty good detail what is happening during the file transfer. That should give you confidence that the transfer is taking place, or if not, why it is not.

The second part of your question is a bit ambiguous, so I am going to toss something out that may or may not apply. You want to read the file on the remote machine without having to retrieve the file is the gist of what I get from your statement. You might put the contents of pid.txt in your document root (or make a symbolic link to the file), then use LWP::Simple to parse the contents of that file. I think that this, or some variation will get you close to what you want. Good luck :-)