Hmmm, the following reads the first 200 bytes for a given file. Uses the fact that the retr method returns a file handle on which you can call read() with a specific size.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Net::FTP;

my $ftp = Net::FTP->new("ftp.nai.com") or die "cannot connect: $@\n";
$ftp->login("anonymous",'anon@') or die "Cannot login: ", $ftp->messag
+e;

#print $ftp->ls or die "ls failed: ", $ftp->message;

my $dataconn = $ftp->retr('legal.txt');
my $buffer;

my $bytes_read = $dataconn->read($buffer, 200);

print $buffer;
[download]