syphilis,
As I indicated, I was able to kludge together a solution using Net::SSH2. There are a couple of reasons why I specifically wanted SFTP. The first is because sometimes that is all that is available (see derby's reply elsewhere in the thread). The second is because SFTP allows you to do things like look around before deciding what to do where you have to know what you want with SCP. I am not saying this is unacceptable but after searching a bit, I was suprised there wasn't a very simple straight forward solution.