How can I get name of the user executing my Perl script?

Question

Try getting your answer from several places, first one wins:

my $username = $ENV{LOGNAME} || $ENV{USER} || getpwuid($<);

crontab sets $LOGNAME so you can use $ENV{"LOGNAME"}. $LOGNAME is also set in my environment by default (haven't looked where it gets set though) so you might be able to use only $LOGNAME instead of $USER.

Although I agree with hacker, don't know what's wrong about getpwuid.

Does this look prettier?

use English qw( −no_match_vars );

my $username = getpwuid $UID;

Sorry, why doesn't that "look nice"? That's the appropriate system call to use. If you're wanting an external program to invoke (e.g. something you could use from a bash script too), there are the tools /usr/bin/id and /usr/bin/whoami for use.