Thanks, I already had Net::FTP->size() and perldoc -f stat, I was just hoping that there was an option in Net::FTP that I hadn't seen that produced the same printout as a manual session. I am using the 'time' as well, but I require millisecond accuracy. I know, then I should load the Time::HiRes Module. Tried that, but it needs a C complier and that's a no-no on the test system. So then I found a pre-compiled version ( as suggested by the Module's author ), but perl complains 'Can't locate loadable object for module Time::HiRes in @INC...etc' which is not very helpful.