ls -laR command to an FTP client and and pipe it through to a series of SAX handlers/filters that ended with a single representation of all the changes. I suppose you could run a daemon on the server-side, every (n) minutes and output a dotfile for the client to read. Or maybe run a stand-alone XML-RPC server, at the remote location, that returns a data structure of the directory layout. If you assume that the server has more processing power/tools than the client, there could be a second method that accepted an XML representation of the client-side directory structure that returns a list of changes. But the point is ...the point is that some pointy-head somewhere is going to seize on this as an opportuntity to write YA markup language... that this is really just a daemon with a dumb GUI for storing paths and an authentication. I wonder how hard it would be to hack the Amphetadesk framework to do this since it's essentially the same concept : every once in a while, do something over here with this login. see also : XML::Directory and I'd love to retire XML::Handler::2Simple in favor of the forthcoming XML::Simple