su on perl script doesn't work from crontab

Question

I have a perl script running o.k. on unix machines and manually from root user but not from crontab on linux machine:

the problematic command is: su - $user

system("su - togui103 -c \"/home/togui103/RunEnv/scripts/tomcatkill.csh\"");

command on crontab:

23 59 * * * /home/togui103/RunEnv/scripts/tc-rotate.pl > /home/togui103/RunEnv/scripts/tc-rotate.log

please advise.

Answer 1

The first thing to do is to capture the stderr from your script

23 59 .../tc-rotate.pl 2>/tmp/script.log >/home/...

and then examine the log for error messages

EDIT: Responding to the comment:

Entries in crontab have a fairly restricted environment so the environment variables that you list aren't available, You can though set them in your crontab file e.g.

APACHE_HOME=/some/path
CATALINA_HOME=/some/other/path
RUN_ENV=someValue
23 59 * * * /home/togui103/RunEnv/scripts/tc-rotate.pl > /home/togui103/RunEnv/scripts/tc-rotate.log 

Answer 2

If the variables are set in the scope of your perl script you should try su -m

-m, --preserve-environment do not reset environment variables

Your command can be:

system("su -m togui103 -c \"/home/togui103/RunEnv/scripts/tomcatkill.csh\"");