virtualsue kicked around a problem that sounds a lot like this earlier this year in Running Perl program w/root privs via cron, which might contain some info useful to you as well.

Although it may not be quite what you're needing, in addition to the comments so far regarding the use of sudo, depending on the operations and environment there may also be the possibility you could use ssh public/private key pairs lacking passwords to do specific operations. Doing so would also have the advantage of not requiring your root password to reside in the scripts.

Hope all the comments help, and maybe let us know which solution worked out best for you and why, maybe.

In reply to Re: su to root in a perlscript by atcroft
in thread su to root in a perlscript by NaSe77

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