Peripherally related to this is autodie...for many I/O operations, it can replace the do_something_or_die construct. In my work, I massage a whole bunch of little files, and so autodie really saves me a ton of typing!

use Modern::Perl;
use autodie;
open my $fh,'>','filename.dat'; #will die() if it can't.
say "Okay, the file's open, now let's do something.";
[download]

This may or may not be useful in the OPs issue, since there's apparently an FTP service going on that is black-boxy, from our perspective.