in reply to logging and cron jobs

Ask your manager to define "neater".

Separate activity logs for each run is very tidy and well organized. Shoehorning multiple, concurrent runs into a single log file is hard to follow even if you don't have corruption issues.

Maybe you just need to have:

* 0 * * * cat /tmplogdir/date/temp*.log >> /logdir/activity.log

[download]

In the crontab as well

The intelligent reader will judge for himself. Without examining the facts fully and fairly, there is no way of knowing whether vox populi is really vox dei, or merely vox asinorum. -- Cyrus H. Gordon

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom