cron doesn't give control back to the script after the wget.
What do you mean by that? Cron isn't somekind of god that picks apart a program and deals with each piece of code individually. All that cron does is look at its watch, say "it's 10 minutes past 4!", fork, set (e)uid and pipe-open /root/crons/downloadsyncs.pl. Cron doesn't care what kind of external programs the script calls, and it certainly won't call those programs on the scripts behalf.

What you should be aware of when calling programs from cron (any program, not just Perl programs), is that you will have a limited environment. There's no user calling the program, and there's no login-shell involved either. There won't be many environment variables, PATH will likely be different than running something from the command-line, and so will your current working directory.

Abigail

In reply to Re: cron/perl interaction gotchas i am missing? by Abigail-II
in thread cron/perl interaction gotchas i am missing? by schweini

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