[cobalt-users] cron question - script doesn't write to log file when run by crond [Raq4]

[Chris Bell <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a cron script (perl) that checks whether the network interface is 
still up and restarts it if there's a problem. I've modified the script so 
that it writes a line to a log file either saying that everything was OK or 
that it had to restart the network interface.

When I run my cron script from the command line (as root) it writes to my 
logfile, but when crond runs it (from the root user crontab) it doesn't... 
The routine that sends me an email seems to work however.

I made sure the logfile was world writable because I figured it might use 
the cron user's privileges to do so...

I also had tried 1>dev/null and 2>dev/null in my crontab and tried removing 
it but as I expected this didn't make a difference. The relevant line in my 
root crontab looks like this:

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * 
/home/sites/home/users/admin/System/NetRestart/netrestart.pl

The relevant part of my script is below... any ideas why this wouldn't 
work? The script seems to function fine otherwise, it's already had to take 
action once, it's just that when I get cron to run it it won't write to the 
log file!

Thanks

cb
--



# if network unavailable, restart

 open (LOG, ">>logs/netrestart.log");
 flock(LOG,2);
 seek(LOG,0,2);

unless ($ok) {
 system ("/etc/rc.d/init.d/network", "stop");
 system ("/etc/rc.d/init.d/network", "start");
 print LOG "$date|$time|Network restarted\n";
    open(MAIL,"|$mailprog");
    print MAIL "To: $recipient\n";
    print MAIL "Subject: NetRestart has restarted the server\n\n";
    print MAIL "The server was restarted at $date, $time\n\n";
    close (MAIL);
} else {
 print LOG "$date|$time|Network check succeeded\n";
}

 close (LOG);