[prog] Perl from cron

jennyw jennyw at dangerousideas.com
Thu Jun 23 13:13:14 EST 2005


Hi, Jacinta and Almut,

Problem solved!

Almut -- Your tip about getcwd() having a problem made me think about 
changing the working directory. I did this in the Ruby script, and 
things seem to be working!

Jacinta -- you might be correct about the taint issue or maybe it's 
because of the Ruby script. It's hard to tell. When I ran the script you 
posted from cron directly, it worked fine -- it was able to find the 
directory okay.  The difference is that there are a lot fewer layers 
involved ... What is happening is that cron is calling a Ruby script 
which in turn invokes a getmail (which is written in Python).  Getmail 
changes the UID before it invokes the Perl script.

Once I added a Dir.chdir() to the Ruby script that kicks off everything, 
things worked great. Not sure why there wouldn't be a cwd, but that 
seems to be the problem.  I think it might have something to do with the 
SUSE cron config -- I didn't have this problem with the same scripts in 
Debian. 

Jen


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