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Asked: 2026-06-14T10:18:20+00:00

I’m executing the following commands in a perl script. #!/usr/bin/perl my $MPSTAT=/usr/bin/mpstat; my $GREP=/bin/grep;

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I’m executing the following commands in a perl script.

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $MPSTAT="/usr/bin/mpstat";
my $GREP="/bin/grep";
my $FREE = "/usr/bin/free";
my $AWK = "/bin/awk";
my $cpu = `$MPSTAT | $GREP all | $AWK '{print (100 - \$12)}'`;
print "CPU is $cpu";

When I run this perl script manually it’s getting executed properly and providing the proper CPU Usage in % (100 – Idle CPU).

But when I execute it as a cronjob it always prints 100 & it appears that $12 of awk is getting the value of 0. Any pointers on why it’s behaving differently in cron would be helpful.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The main differences between running as a child of cron are:

    1. The user ID might be different (root vs normal user)
    2. The environment is nearly empty, at least pretty different

    The second part often means that programs might output in a different language or number format due to the values of the LANG and LC_* environment variables which might be set for the normal user but not when run under cron (or vice versa).

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