I did use right syntax. it was typo when I put there here.anyways it's giving me error saying it can not aceess path I have described.sharedrive is on my network.and perl files are in c:/perl/bin. I'm trying to get files from share drive and use my perl script to get data out of those files using perl script from c:/perl/bin everything works ok until i come to the point where i'm trying to get data out of files from sharedrive.the path and filename is correct.may be there's another way to access sharedrive???