Which is the protocol you use to share the drive? SMB? And which is the OS on the machine that needs connecting? Who is the owner of the share? The user that should run the connecting script has access to the share?

Too many question, too little information...

You do NOT need the absolute path.

The simplest way to read the directory is to use the perl opendir, readdir,closedir functions.

(Of course you need to ensure that you have the appropriate privileges to access the remote directory.

There are modules in CPAN (like File::Set) that will assist polling the directory, and notifying you of changes.

Windows has invisible shares called C$, D$, etc representing C:, D:, etc.

If the machine you wish to poll has file sharing enabled,
if the machine on which the program runs is a Win32 machine with "Client for Microsoft Networks" enabled, and
if your login and password is the same for that machine as it is for the current machine,
then you can just open \\machine\c$\some\dir (or //machine/c$/some/dir if it's easier) using opendir. Win32::ChangeNotify will also accepts such a path.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $path = '\\\\godzilla\\c$\\temp';

for (;;) {
   my $count = () = do { opendir my $dh, $path or die; readdir($dh) };
   print("$count\n");
   sleep(2);
}
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Terminating on signal SIGINT(2)
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use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::ChangeNotify qw(
   FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_DIR_NAME
   FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_FILE_NAME
);

my $path = '\\\\godzilla\\c$\\temp';

for (;;) {
   my $count = () = do { opendir my $dh, $path or die; readdir($dh) };
   print("$count\n");

   my $notify = Win32::ChangeNotify->new($path, 0, FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_
+DIR_NAME|FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_FILE_NAME);
   $notify->wait or die;
}
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Terminating on signal SIGINT(2)
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Update: Added code.