That's a bug.

No it is not a bug, cron was designed that way

cron is designed to set up a minimal environment when it starts a cron job. It is not a login session so it does not add any environment settings specified via login-semantics such as found in rc files. it is up to you to set them up.

The Cron Environment and Cron Job Failures discusses this in more depth.

In reply to Re^5: Perl app won't compile /run from cron by huck
in thread Perl app won't compile /run from cron by dazz

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