You can go at it from the other end. At least, when you're working on Windows, as I assume.

If you do use binmode on the file handle, when you're generating the file, then you're creating a Unix style text file. (If you don't, you're making a Windows style textfile.) In this case it is safe to FTP the file to a Linux machine, in binary mode.

That is all under the assumption that the character set is compatible between the two platforms: either UTF-8 or ISO-Latin-1 (or Windows CP1252, if you don't use any weird characters, like "smart quotes".)