What a singularly bad node title! Wouldn't "Return codes with FTP" or "Cross platform FTP question" or something like that have been better? Anyway, your error is right here:

I wrote a module a couple of years back that does all our FTP's between UNIX servers

Your node shows that you obviously do not have enough knowledge of the FTP protocol for such a job, so you should use Net::FTP or one of the many modules on CPAN to do the job for you properly.