Question

I’m trying to run a perl script on my Ubuntu server using cron. I have 3 perl scripts:

• works.pl (Works from the terminal. Works as a cron job)
• fails.pl (Works from the terminal. Fails as a cron job)
• functions.pl (all my shared functions are stored in here)

The only difference I can think of between ‘works.pl’ and ‘fails.pl’, is that ‘fails.pl’ uses the require() statement that references ‘functions.pl’. ‘Fails.pl’ does not reference ‘functions.pl’.

Extra info

• All of my perl scripts are located in the same folder, which is
  outside of my public folder.
• All of my perl scripts have the same permissions (740).

Any ideas? My user level is novice btw 🙂

Thanks.

Answer 1

require tries to find the script in one of the directories listed in the @INC array. This array usually contains the current directory, .. Therefore if your current directory is the one that functions.pl is located in then running fails.pl should work.

There are two ways to achieve this: First, change the directory before running the script, e.g. (cron entry example)

5 12 * * * cd /home/user/path/to/script ; ./fails.pl

Second, tell Perl where to find your script at compile time by putting this near the top of fails.pl:

BEGIN {
  unshift @INC, "/home/user/path/to/script";
};