Question

I have a Perl script which I want to run every 4 hours through cron. But somehow it fails to execute through cron and runs fine if I run it through command line. Following is the command which I set in crontab:

perl -q /path_to_script/script.pl > /dev/null

Also, when I run this command on command prompt, it does not execute but when I go in the leaf folder in path_to_script and execute the file, it runs fine.

Also, where will the log files of this cron job be created so that I can view them?

Answer 1

You should probably change the working directory to “leaf folder”.

Try this in your crontab command:

cd /path_to_script; perl script.pl >/dev/null

Wrt. log files. Cron will mail you the output. But since you sent stdout to /dev/null, only stderr will be mailed to you.

If you want the output saved in a log file, then pipe the stderr/stdout output of the script into a file, like so:

cd /path_to_script; perl script.pl 2>&1 >my_log_file