I imagine that you'd only need to make sure that you run the GAIM script as the same user as the terror level caching user.

so from cron, you write the terror level to /tmp/terror, and then pick that up later from the GAIM plugin, or you could just make /tmp/terror world readable (then anyone on your box could use the script without having to get their own terror file.

in other news: first post -HTH