Addressing just the ls -lR problem, I took a recent script and modified it to get ls to work:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings; 
use Net::FTP::File;

use constant HOST   => 'ftp.cpan.org';
use constant DIR    => '/pub/CPAN';
use constant FILE   => 'README';

my $ftp = Net::FTP->new(
    HOST,
    Timeout => 1,
    Debug   => 1,
    Passive => 1) or die "Cannot contact HOST: $@\n";
$ftp->login('anonymous');
$ftp->cwd(DIR);
$ftp->binary;
print $ftp->ls('-lR');
$ftp->quit;
[download]

Does this help?