A script I am building needs to identify and get remote files that
have changed since its last run. The easiest format for date
comparisons is the epoc time format (or anything similar that can be
used in a simple numeric or string comparision).

The FTP::Comon ls method returns the date in a hash (month string,
yearOrTime, dayofMonth). I would have to convert each item to form a
useful string (ie epoc or "YYYYMMDDHHMM") for comparision. That's
not a major task, but I was wondering if there an alternative way of
returning the date in such a manner. (Note that while Net::FTP's
mdtm method returns in Epoc, it is impractical since it only works
with individual file names).

Tom