running a perl script from a windows scheduled task

Question

I have awstats installed on windows 2008 server. I schedule the Updatestats.bat file to run every day, the task runs fine without error, but the script is not being executed or is throwing an error that I cannot see.

-- If I run the bat file directly from command line then it works fine. --

I have tried various alternatives to the windows scheduler, such as " nncron " and " Freebyte Task Scheduler ", nncron had the same issue, but the freebyte app worked, but sadly it does not run as a service so is of no use. here is the contents of the bat file, all lines look like this.

c:\strawberry\perl\bin\perl.exe D:\AWStats\wwwroot\cgi-bin\awstats.pl config=earlsmere.co.uk -update

anyone got any ideas ?

Answer 1

Your unattended environment is obviously different from you command line. Check if the following are set:

1. Script's working directory, if it reads anything from it or uses relative paths.
2. PERL*_LIB environment variables if your script uses any modules.
3. PATH environment variable, if your script calls any external scripts/binaries.
4. User that is running scheduled tasks have sufficient rights for everything you want to do.

As a quick workaround you can set them directly in script using chdir function , lib module , and $ENV{PATH} entry .

You also can try to capture standard output and error with following redirections before you start doing anything else:

open(STDOUT, '>>', '/full/path/to/out.log') || die "Error stdout: $!";
open(STDERR, '>>', '/full/path/to/err.log') || die "Error stderr: $!";

Note that you really should use full paths there in case you indeed have working directory set wrong. And make sure target directory/file is writable for anyone.

Answer 2

Looks like the output gets lost in space...

I suggest redirecting the output of the command to a file, like this:

c:\strawberry\perl\bin\perl.exe D:\AWStats\wwwroot\cgi-bin\awstats.pl config=earlsmere.co.uk -update > c:\my_log.txt 2>&1

(courtesy of Anders Lindahl: Redirect stdout and stderr to a single file in DOS )