inscatolati - Get out of the box! :)

Ok, symptoms:

• Your script dies with an error similar to the following:

  stream /dev/conslog is not writable at ... console is not writable at ... no connection to syslog available ...

• If you run your script as 'root', everything works perfectly, while as a normal user syslog does not seem to work... no! users should be allowed to log messages! it's not a privileged operation! don't ever think about that!

• 'logger' or similar commands seems to work and log fine, without troubles, both as users and administrators... I used something like:

  $ logger -t test -p local0.notice 'test' $ su # logger -t test -p local0.notice 'test'

• make sure syslog is properly configured and running and that devices/unix sockets have the correct permissions, by checking that the above command ('logger ...') works correctly.

• make sure your code calls the 'openlog' functions once and only once. On my perl 5.8.4 Linux System, I had two different modules calling the 'openlog' function... and well, as 'root', everything worked just fine, but as soon as I switched to an unprivileged user, the second 'openlog' caused the error described.

Ever had an error like:

$ ./my-perl-script Can't locate ... in @INC (@INC contains: ...) at ... line ... . BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ... line ... .

Well, this often happens when you have a directory with your perl scripts and its own modules, which you have not installed yet.

A good solution is usually to go in the lib/ directory of the tarball, or the directory containing the name of the missing module. For example, if the message above complains about missing RBC/XML.pm, with something like:

Can't locate RBC/XML.pm in @INC (@INC ...

You can simply:

$ find . -type d -name 'RBC' ./lib/RBC $ cd lib $ ../my-perl-script

Well, if you can't change directory, or you get another error about another missing library, you can simply use the PERL5LIB or PERLLIB environment variable, with something like:

$ PERL5LIB=/home/.../lib/ ./my-perl-script or $ export PERL5LIB=/home/.../lib/ $ ./my-perl-script

Note that if you use an absolute path in PERL5LIB, you can run my-perl-script from anywhere on your file system. Instead of PERL5LIB you can always use PERLLIB, or the -I parameter to the perl executable, with something like:

$ perl -I/home/.../lib/ ./my-perl-script

PERLLIB and PERL5LIB are ignored in case the script is somewhat privileged. To know more about all of this, just run:

$ man perlrun

and search '-I' or 'PERL5LIB'.

Either:

• Check the documentation of the module one more time, you are using it the wrong way.

• If you wrote the module yourself, you forgot to add the line:

  package Full::Name::of::module::XXX;