Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!spool.mu.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!gatech!udel!haven!uvaarpa!mmdf
From: anderson@optical.squibb.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: lossage running perl script from crontab
Message-ID: <1991Feb28.193638.4002@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 28 Feb 91 19:36:38 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: anderson@optical.squibb.com
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 36


When I run the following script from the csh prompt, it works fine.
However, when I try to run it from cron it doesn't quite work as
expected.  Here's the crontab entry:

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/local/bin/perl
 /usr/local/bin/cron_ping


Here's cron_ping:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#
#       Script to ping bozo to insure network
#       integrity.

open(LOG, ">>/var/log/ping_log") || die "Can't open /var/log/ping_log";
chop($date = `date`);
chop($result = `ping bozo 5`);         # try for 5 secs to ping helix
print LOG $date ," ",  $result, "\n";
close(LOG);


Here's what /var/log/ping_log looks like:

Thu Feb 28 14:15:02 EST 1991			<- from cron
Thu Feb 28 14:20:01 EST 1991			<- from cron
Thu Feb 28 14:25:02 EST 1991			<- from cron
Thu Feb 28 14:28:20 EST 1991 helix is alive	<- by hand
Thu Feb 28 14:28:38 EST 1991 helix is alive	<- by hand
Thu Feb 28 14:30:01 EST 1991			<- from cron

Why does it work from the shell and not from cron?

Jay Anderson
anderson@optical.squibb.com