Probably the best solution is to put in lots of code to catch various errors, then you know what died and how to fix it in 95 percent of the cases. For example, I am almost sure that Net::FTP does not actually do an exit when it has an error, so if you read the perldocs and figured out what it does do, you should be able to wrap it in if statements and the like and repair the error with letting the program die. for the case where an exit is called, there is always wrapping it in a eval and checking the value of $@ for the error that broke it. But there is always more than one way to do it
                - Ant