Hi,
I code a website that lives on a linux box with Apache. I have access to php and MySQL. I have implemented cron jobs to query an off-site database, store it to a delimited text file, and then upload that info into MySQL. Because this happens in the wee hours of the morning, I am not here to type in a password. So I (temporarily) hard-coded the password in the perl script that the crontab runs. I imagine that this is very insecure and want to figure out how to encrypt this password so that these cron jobs can run without my intervention.

Any suggestions?

Sincere thanks!