You found a material gap in my code. Problem is the escaped $ at the end. The backslash in front of it will be doubly escaped and then the $ will cause trouble.

use strict;
my $inputDirectory = '\\\\10.81.253.140\\IPC$';
# need to dublicate each \ in string
$inputDirectory =~ s|\\|\\\\|g;
$inputDirectory =~ s|\$|\\x{24}|g;  # replace $ with hex representatio
+n
my @lines = `net use`;
foreach my $line ( @lines ) {
    next unless $line =~ m|$inputDirectory|;
    $line =~ /(^\S+)/;
    print $1;
}
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