You might also look at at depending on what your use case is. at inherits almost all of its invoker's environment, while cron gets pretty near none of it, which can lead to some frustration. In any event, the code on the end of your post is entirely superfluous, and as others have said, how to get cron working isn't a Perl issue at all. Cron pays no attention whatsoever to details of the commands you give it, it just runs them at the specified time in a clean environment. If it's an executable and properly constructed, it will execute. If it's not, it won't. Also of course, the standard advice for stuff like this--try it and see what happens.