comment on

I don't even know where to start looking for this bug,
It's opening in the "wrong" place, so let's start with the open call:

open(LOG, ">>$dir/$log_file") or croak "Unable to append to error log:
+ $!";
[download]

So it uses $dir .. now to see where that's set, which is in BEGIN .. and has this snippet:

    $0 =~ '(.*[\\\/])\w+\.\w+$'; 
    $dir = $1;
[download]

Several important items here:

never use $1 w/o checking that the match actually succeeded .. if you don't, you'll get unexpected values.
```
  $dir = $1 if $0 =~ m#/.*[\\/])\w+\.\w+$#;
[download]
```
$0 is the program being run, so this is setting $dir to that path. Thus why that's where the log file is being opened.
Use something like File::Basename to parse the path instead of a regex. For example, if the script is /usr/local/bin/foo (instead of foo.pl) then your regex fails.
```
use File::Basename;
$dir = dirname($0);
[download]
```

In reply to Re: Logging module sometimes writes its file in the wrong directory by davidrw
in thread Logging module sometimes writes its file in the wrong directory by Anonymous Monk

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