I've inherited a system that downloads bioinformatics data from various sites using Net::FTP. There are many scripts that use ftp to examine files and download those that are new and desired. All this works fairly well, but I've been asked to add a way to limit the bandwidth used by our downloads.

There are many cases of code like this:

          $f_curdir = $ftp1->pwd();
          $rc = $ftp1->cwd($dir_to_use);
          $ftp1->binary;
          @new_remote_list = $ftp1->dir(".");
[download]

It's looking like I'll need to replace all uses of ftp with either wget or cURL, and that's looking like a lot of work to gain one feature. Can you think of a way to limit the bandwidth use of these downloads without replacing the use of Net::FTP ?

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