Cron is a job scheduling program available on UNIX-like platforms. Most system commands can be scheduled including the execution of Perl programs. Once a job is setup, cron will run it as scheduled even if the user is not logged in, which can be a great way to automate sysadmin tasks or repetitive jobs. This article describes how to run Perl scripts with cron.
This is a simple trick for conveniently running local Perl as a root user on UNIX-based systems.
When Perl is executing a program, it maintains the user id of the process owner in a global variable ($<). When a Perl program is executed by root or a user with root privileges (e.g. using the sudo command), the user id variable is always set to zero. This can be checked at the command line:
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