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From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: why does system() not work when from root's crontab?
Message-ID: <1990Mar1.210532.5891@iwarp.intel.com>
Date: 1 Mar 90 21:05:32 GMT
References: <6998@pitt.UUCP>
Sender: news@iwarp.intel.com
Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Lines: 24
In-Reply-To: al@ee.pitt.edu (Alan Martello)

In article <6998@pitt.UUCP>, al@ee (Alan Martello) writes:
| My perl script works fine when I run it as root interactively,
| however, when it is run from crontab (as root), I can kill the
| processes just fine, but the "umount", "dump" and 
| "mount -av" commands all fail.  
| 
| I am calling these programs via a perl system() call.

I suspect you are running into a problem not with Perl, but with the
shell.  Specifically, umount, dump, and mount are all in /etc (or
/usr/etc, depending on the time of day at Sun :-).  Try something
like:

	$ENV{'PATH'} = "/etc:/usr/etc:$ENV{'PATH'}";

in the first few lines of your Perl program.  Cron's default path is
more along the lines of /usr/ucb:/bin:/usr/bin.

$ENV{'MOTD'}='Just another Perl hacker,';system('printenv MOTD');
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
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