I've got a perl script that I run from root but sudoed as apache. Like so:

# sudo -u apache /usr/bin/perl /path/to/script.pl

The script uses File::Find to parse a directory. Bascially it does something like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use File::Find;

my @dirList = ('/dir/to/parse');

find(\&wanted, @dirList);

sub wanted {
  print "Processing: $File::Find::name\n";
}

print "done.\n";

[download]
The problem is that if you are in the "/root" directory when you try this, you end up with the script doing some processing but then it dies out with: "Can't cd to /root: Permission denied". The same error shows up if you try to run the script in the root crontab with something like:

1 * * * * sudo -u apache /usr/bin/perl /path/to/script.pl

I looked around for a while to see if anyone else was running into this but my searches didn't return anything. After some playing around I came up with the following that seems to work for me:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use File::Find;
use FindBin;

chdir($FindBin::RealBin);

my @dirList = ('/dir/to/parse');

find(\&wanted, @dirList);

sub wanted {
  print "Processing: $File::Find::name\n";
}

print "done.\n";

[download]

Figured I'd post here in case it helps someone else, but I'm also curious if this is the best way to do this or what other options are.

In reply to File::Find with sudo from root by anotherSmith

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