rah has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I wrote a script using the Net::SFTP::Foreign module for performing unattended sftp file transfers. The script works beautifully from the command line on any platform. It also performs without problems when called from cron on MacOS X or on Redhat Linux. However when I try to run the same script from cron on HP-UX or AIX, it fails with a broken pipe error. The failure is

open2: exec of ssh -l user some.location.com -s sftp failed at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Net/SFTP/Foreign.pm line 67

Additionally, HP-UX complains about write to ssh pipe error, while AIX complains about a read from ssh pipe error. The setup uses an RSA key, so the script does not prompt for any user input. Does anyone know what is going on and/or how I might be able to coax this script to run from cron?

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Re: Running a Net::SFTP::Foreign script from cron
by grep (Monsignor) on Nov 07, 2006 at 21:15 UTC
    Your cron does not have access to your shell PATH and Net::SFTP::Foreign uses the ssh command line utility (as opposed to Net::SFTP which is pure-perl). ssh is not in cron's path (but it is in yours), so Net::SFTP::Foreign can't find it

    The remedy is either to switch to Net::SFTP or to set ssh_cmd => $sshcmd to the full path of your ssh. 

    my $sftp = Net::SFTP::Foreign->new('host',{ ssh_cmd => '/usr/bin/ssh' 
+});

    [download]


    grep
    One dead unjugged rabbit fish later
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      Thank you so much. I must have had one of those duh moments. ssh is in /usr/bin on my two systems that work (and therefore in my sparse cron environment), but installed elsewhere on my two systems that failed. Good catch. Works fine now.
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      For Windows users, the process is slightly more convoluted.
      Seems like setting ssh_cmd => $sshcmd still results in a "Unable to connect: Connection to remote server is broken" error.

      My solution to this was to create a ".bat" batch file which contains the command to execute the script perl "D:\Projects\sftp.plx"
      Then using "Scheduled Task" to run the above batch file under a user account which can see the path specified in $ssh_cmd
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Re: Running a Net::SFTP::Foreign script from cron
by salva (Canon) on Nov 08, 2006 at 16:36 UTC
    question added to the module docs as a FAQ ;-)
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