Edward, As a couple of comments have already pointed out, you do not necessarily have your expected environment set when your cron job runs. The solution is to fully path your commands and files. So, make sure you know where your commands are:

MBPro:~ oren$ which echo
/bin/echo
MBPro:~ oren$ which nohup
/usr/bin/nohup
[download]

and update your script (change your locations as needed)

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w 
use strict; 
system("/bin/echo test > /home/monkfan/testcron.txt"); 
#system("/usr/bin/nohup perl /home/monkfan/later_other_code.pl&");
[download]

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.