Being that you are on NT. You might want to look into Win32::Internet.
This module contains a nice ftp function. For your project you will want to look specifically at the list method. It would allow you to do something like this.

@files = $FTP->List();
    @textfiles = $FTP->List("*.txt");
    foreach $file (@textfiles) {
      print "Name: ", $file, "\n";
    }
[download]

The list method also takes an optional list mode parameter in this case 2, which would give information like size, attributes,creation time and so forth.

@files = $FTP->List("*.*", 2);
[download]