Generally speaking, it's a poor worksmith that blames his tools. And here, as in most languages, the reasonable approach is to assume that it is your code at fault, not perl or BerkeleyDB. That's not to say the perl interpreter is bug free (it isn't). Just that in programming in various languages since about '93, I've only happened upon one provable, verifiable compiler bug (MSVC - verified it by checking the assembly output which was wrong), and a couple of probable compiler/interpreter bugs (which I worked around by upgrading).

The rest of the time, however, and there are a lot of these, it's my code that is at fault. Most of these result in a "well, duh, of course it's going to go wrong!" when I realise the source of my error. Even then, the rest of these are just esoteric uses of code.

You may already know all of this. I can't tell as this was your first post here, and because you didn't post any code from which we could duplicate and cause the same problem with.

Thus, as CountOrlok asks, some example code would help. As would the error messaage. Yes, I know that you said vixie-cron has a bug here. So the question is - why can't you use a different cron? There are a few available. Or you could just use a wrapper script which reopens its stdout and stderr to a file and then runs your failing script.

The first thing that really hits me in the head is that it's the redirection, not cron, that is confusing some code, whether that's yours or BerkeleyDB's. And that it has nothing to do with the 5.8.7 interpreter, but the newer version of the BerkeleyDB module(s) that would come with the newer interpreter.

In reply to Re: possible perl5.8.7 bug? by Tanktalus
in thread possible perl5.8.7 bug? by Pstack

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