[Gambas-user] strange behaviour from commandline - empty mail attachments

[Rolf-Werner Eilert]

Am 15.08.2013 12:25, schrieb Bruce:
> On Thu, 2013-08-15 at 12:07 +0200, Rolf-Werner Eilert wrote:
>> I could build a client which prints a pdf from commandline and sends it
>> to someone via e-mail, the Cairo class makes the pdfs.
>>
>> My Gambas program is called by cron. It checks a mailbox and reads the
>> mails if any. These are contact forms. The data are then processed into
>> a pdf and the resulting pdf sent back to the person which sent the
>> contact form.
>>
>> The strange thing is, as long as I start the program by hand, everything
>> runs as expected. But when it is started by cron, the pdfs which are
>> sent back reach the recipient empty, i. e. 0 Bytes.
>>
>> Sending is achieved by an external Perl script named sendEmail, I shell
>> out to start it. (This is because the SMTP client in Gambas doesn't want
>> to send these mails via any of my providers, haven't found the reason yet.)
>>
>> But it doesn't seem to be this script's mistake. I tested the same
>> pdf-file with a special version of the program which jumped directly
>> into mail despatch, and when I started it from within the IDE,
>> everything ran fine, but from cron it would send 0 byte pdfs.
>>
>> This is slightly OT, but it might have to do with the way Gambas handles
>> Shells or file rights or something completely different... Does anyone
>> here have an idea?
>>
>> Rolf
>
> Hi Rolf,
>
> The first thing I'd be looking at is your working directories, I presume
> you are using temporary files somewhere. Don't forget that the cron
> daemon is running in a completely different environment to your User
> environment.
>
> hth
> Bruce
>

I quickly browsed through the Perl script, and there are error messages 
in case it cannot read the attachment. I'm not that intimate with Perl, 
but I still suspect the Shell mechanisms of Gambas to confuse the script.

Rolf