When you run the script from the command line, is runs with whatever privaleges your logon id has. If you can dir the target share, then the program can.

When the script is invoke as a cgi, it only has whatever privaleges the webserver account has. These usually defualt to very low privaleges for safety.

Find out what account the web server runs as--ask your SysAdmin or ISP if you don't know how to find this information yourself--and then logon as that account and try your dir from the commandline. It almost certainly will give you "Access denied".

To summarise:

• This is nothing to do with perl.
• Nothing to do with your code.
• No amount of changing to your code will fix the problem.

You need to give the webserver account the correct permissions, or talk to someone that has the authority to do this on your behalf.