cron was the last result i had to employ to try to fix this thing.

there's a monitoring program called nagios that i was initially using to get the values of the variables. but it wasn't working. so i decided to use cron instead and write it to a file and then write another script to retrieve the info from the flatfile.

and even that isn't working.

the log file being written to has write/read/execute permission for everyonne. so i dont get why the fields just keep disappearing like this.