From your description of the path/drive, it appears that you are accessing the path from some version of Windows.

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.