Yes and no.

You can read an environment, but as cron jobs run their own environment, you need to load the environment you want. See Get default login environment.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm a bit confused though. In he example you link to do I need to change the rest of my script or does $ENV get overwritten by the function? Do I just call %ENV = (%ENV, get_login_env()); and continue as I did before With my $varname = $ENV{'ENV_VAR_NAME'};? Thanks

The function returns a hash. What you do with that hash is up to you. You haven't shown your program, so I can only give you general advice.

One approach would be to set up %ENV with the newly found values. Another one would be to merge %ENV with the newly found values, as you (and the example) show. A third approach would be to keep the two sets of values separate.

To simulate running under the login environment as closely as possible, %ENV = get_login_env() will certainly do that, but in the process, you lose any indication that your program is running as cron job. In general, I think the approach of merging %ENV and the values from the login environment, with the values from the login environment taking precedence is a good one.

You can access environment variables in a script run as a cron job but take note that cron jobs often have only a sub-set of the environment available to a user shell. For instance, you will likely have a minimal $PATH under cron. It might be worth writing a small script to dump the environment to a file then run it as a cron job to see what's available.

I hope this is helpful.