The logs are your friend. If I'm working in a hosted environment, I ask the administrator to create an application specific system user and group, application specific access and error logs (if its a web app) and to assign my own personal user to the application's group, and use chown www-data::appgroup (assuming web app) to make the log file accessible to me, so I don't need to bother the administrator on this more than once. That permits me to monitor the logs myself. Another useful tool I recently discovered is Log::Log4perl. Makes implementing logging trivially easy. Of course it sounds like your script is run from a cli, making logging permissions easier. You can just create the logs you need in your own home directory.