bonjour Foggy Bottoms;

Perl for system administration, an extraordinarily handy book (David N. Blank-Edelman), gives the following as solutions to your problem: it allows you to watch in real time, if that is your penchant:

use Win32::AdvNotify;
$aobj = new Win32::AdvNotify();
$thread = $aobj->StartThread(Directory => 'C:\monks',
                             Filter => All,
                             WatchSubtree => 0) 
or die "monkwatcher cannot start\n";
[download]

Filter Parameters can be more focused: ie changes in one of

FILE_NAME

DIR_NAME

ATTRIBUTES

SIZE

LAST_WRITE

CREATION

SECURITY

if all you are looking for is whether the directory size has changed, you can use the following:

use Win32::DirSize;
chomp(my $dir = shift || <DATA>);
my @dirstats;
push @dirstats,sprintf("%-40s%-10s%-10s%-10s\n",
               "Directory", "Size", "FileCount", "DirCount");

if (dir_size($dir, my $dirstat) == DS_RESULT_OK){
    my $size = best_convert(my $unit, 
                $dirstat->{HighSize}, 
                $dirstat->{LowSize});
    my $filecount = $dirstat->{FileCount};
    my $dircount = $dirstat->{DirCount};
    push @dirstats, sprintf("%-40s%-10s%-10s%-10s\n",
                $dir, 
                sprintf("%8.4f", $size) . $unit,
                $filecount, 
                $dircount);
}
push @dirstats, undef;
map { print } grep { defined } @dirstats;

__DATA__
\\captains\nemo$\nautilus
[download]

hope that helps,

wufnik

-- in the world of the mules there are no rules --