Not accepting the environment variable

TStanley has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a script that reads in the files of a directory, looks for specific files (based upon the filename), then prints those files out. Now in the .profile of the user, I have an environment variable called PDPRINTER set, so that I can use a special command to print out the report double-sided. When I run this script from the command line, I have absolutely no problems. However, when I run it from cron, it doesn't work(i.e. the files don't print, although the directory listing that I print using lpr does). The O.S. is HP-UX 11.0 with Perl 5.6.1

#!/opt/perl5/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use File::Slurp;

my $DIR="/home/mis/ftpstore";

my @Files=read_dir($DIR);
my $file;

@Files=sort{$a cmp $b}@Files;

system("ls -l $DIR/Unity*.prpt | lpr");
foreach $file(@Files){
  if($file=~/Unity\d{3}\.prpt/){
  ## This command is a specialized command for the
  ## HP Distributed Print Service.
    system("pdpr -x sides=2 $DIR/$file");
  }
}
[download]

Any suggestions or ideas are welcome. Thanks.

TStanley
--------
There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us
about this script for Hamlet they've worked out
-- Douglas Adams/Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Comment on Not accepting the environment variable Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Not accepting the environment variable by blakem (Monsignor) on Oct 25, 2001 at 05:33 UTC
Might want to check Get default login environment by tilly. -Blake	[reply]
Re: Not accepting the environment variable by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Oct 25, 2001 at 06:34 UTC
By default `cron` runs with an empty environment. You can set PDPRINTER=1 (and any other environment you need) at the top of your crontab. After Compline, Zaxo	[reply]
Re: Not accepting the environment variable by davis (Vicar) on Oct 25, 2001 at 12:12 UTC
From the HP-UX 11.0 crontab(1) man page: cron supplies a default environment for every shell, defining: HOME=user's-home-directory LOGNAME=user's-login-id PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:. SHELL=/usr/bin/sh Users who desire to have their .profile executed must explicitly do so in the crontab entry or in a script called by the entry.	[reply]
Re: Not accepting the environment variable by higle (Chaplain) on Oct 25, 2001 at 05:58 UTC
In particular, you can fix the problem from within your script by setting the environment variable: `$ENV{'PDPRINTER'} = $foo;` [download] Try that, and it should work. `#------------- perl -e 's=$;$/=$\;W=i;$\=$/;s;;XYW\\U$"\;\);sig,$_^=$[x5,print;'` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Not accepting the environment variable by TStanley (Canon) on Oct 25, 2001 at 21:10 UTC
After trying the suggestions of blakem and higle without success, I finally tried it as a shell script and sourced in another file with the parameters I needed, and it worked. As much as I like to use Perl, sometimes all you need is a simple knife instead of a Swiss Army chainsaw :-) TStanley -------- There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out -- Douglas Adams/Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy	[reply]