Well, it's not reporting any errors because you are not checking for any. As others have pointed out, things could go wrong with the open() call, but you are ignoring them. Why would Perl report anything if you silence it?

As for cron, programs started by the cron daemon are run as the user who owns the crontab file - if all would be running as root, it would be really trivial to hack the system, wouldn't it? However, one should realize that the enviroment is different than running from the command line. There's no shell involved, so no profile is run setting up a myriad of environment variables. Furthermore, the working directory is likely to be different than when you run it from the command line. And since you are not using an absolute path, that's very likely the main cause of your problem.....

Abigail