[prog] Perl from cron

[Jacinta Richardson]

jennyw wrote:
> Hi, there! I guess my first message wasn't clear -- all those things 
> have been tried. The value of the variable should be the abs path of the 
> directory that the script resides in. When run from cron, it's undefined.
> 
> I tried setting the path env var in the script called by cron, too, but 
> it didn't have an effect. I looked through the rest of the env vars, 
> especially looking for anything path or Perl related, but I didn't see 
> anything that seems like it should make a difference.

If you could give us the output of running a script *just* containing:

	#!/usr/bin/perl -w
	use File::Basename;
	use FindBin qw($RealBin);
	use Data::Dumper;

	print "RealBin: $RealBin\n";
	print Dumper \%ENV;

when run via the shell and again via cron.  I think I could probably help you. 
Another useful thing would be to know the permissions of the program and what 
user cron is running the script as.

I suspect you're suffering from a Perl Taint issue, but can't yet be certain. 
When running with taint on (which occurs any time the real and/or effective user 
id are different from the owner of the script) the PATH environment variable is 
explicity ignored.  Usually if your problem is a taint violation you'd receive 
an error with taint killing the script the moment something insecure was found. 
    It might be possible that something in FindBin or a module it uses is 
catching that error and ignoring it however.

All the best,

	Jacinta

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