Desperately need help with cron job!

[beartopi]

This used to run and no longer runs as a cron job. The command is entered via control panel like so:

~/www/cgi-bin/getbullion2656_5.cgi

First line of this CGI contains #!/bin/sh, I can run this from my cgi-bin directory like so:

./getbullion2656_5.cgi

and from command line this has no trouble generating non-zero output.

CGI file generates output with a redirect:

#!/bin/sh
perl /home/beartopi/www/cgi-bin/bullionfilter.pl 250 0 5 2656 > /home/beartopi/w
ww/cgi-bin/bullion2656_5.txt

This all worked just fine last week.

I tried adding more cron jobs via control panel and ran into a limit. Last night got an expert to help me edit crontab with using ranges in hours. This morning woke up and saw that all my output files were completely zeroed out. I emptied out cron jobs via control panel I tried putting back in one cron job (via control panel) the way I had it working before but still no luck.

All my permissions are now cranked up to the max. Now when my one cron job runs it just zeroes the output.

I also tried entering a cron job with full path as:
/home/beartopi/www/cgi-bin/getbullion2656_5.cgi

and it makes no difference.

What have I done to cron jobs???? Please help, as last week my cron jobs were working and now no longer do. I need to get this working, like immediately.

[jason]

Weird. If you haven't already done so, I would open a support ticket on this. It sounds as if cron somehow got corrupted on your server.

--Jason

[beartopi]

If anyone cares, I have finally discovered the cause of the mysterious cron failure. To track it down, I added redirected error output to my cgi command like so (note the addition of 2>err.out)

perl /home/beartopi/www/cgi-bin/bullionfilter.pl 250 0 5 2656 > /home/beartopi/w
ww/cgi-bin/bullion2656_5.txt 2>err.out

then set a cron job up to run. My output file, once again, was zeroed out.

I found err.out sitting in my home directory and it had all kinds of Perl complaints, stuff about not finding something in @INC. Definitely a path problem.

So, I added a line like the following to each of my .pl files called from cgi files, so cron would find my homegrown Perl module:

use lib qw(/home/beartopi/www/cgi-bin) ;

In this case my module is called mylib.pm so my .pl files also have

use mylib ;

I'm crossing my fingers and hoping this fix "holds".

[beartopi]

I should add that my sample cron job that "happened" to run wasn't referencing any outside libraries, hence my descent into madness on Monday.