perlcronperlbrew

Running a Perl script from crontab when you use Perlbrew

I have tried the following and find it to work. This is done with a non-privileged user. First find out where your perl command is:

# which perl

Then check the value of PERL5LIB:

# echo $PERL5LIB

Then, at the crontab file of the user, do something like:

MAILTO=<my email address for the jobs output>
HOME=/home/myhome
PERL5LIB=/home/myhome/perl5/lib/perl5

0 2 * * * $HOME/<rest of path to perl>/perl $HOME/<path to my perl script> arg1 ...

This will run a job at 2am and seems to find all Perl libs correctly. My question is: is this complete and portable? Is there a better way?

I have seen a number of bash and perl scripts out there that are supposed to prepare the environment for the execution of a Perl script, but this seems to suffice. Any advice will be welcome!

EDIT: From the comments to the question, it seems that I am using a "bad" mixture of Perlbrew and local::lib. The way to make sure libraries get installed inside a particular Perlbrew version is answered here: How do I install CPAN modules while using perlbrew?. Both cpan and cpanm will install under PERL5LIB when you are using local::lib unless you explicitly tell them to do otherwise. Also cpanm seems to be better suited to working along with Perlbrew.

Solution

  • The shebang (#!) line of the script should point to the (perlbrew-installed) perl it is meant to run under. (This should be done as part of installing the script.) That's all you need.

    0 2 * * * /path/to/script arg1 ...