It would be because from runs as the root user. Castget probably looks at the file path $HOME/.castgetrc. For your regular user, $HOME is probably /home/myamazingusername. For the root user, $HOME is probably /root . You can get a root terminal session by running sudo -i in a terminal console window. You can try running castget there to see what happens. Sudo -n: -n, --non-interactive Avoid prompting the user for input of any kind. If a password is required for the command to run, sudo, will display an error message and exit. It’s just a nice thing to put in non-interactive scripts that use sudo. Sometimes you can end up with scripts that just wait endlessly for a password that will never be input because the script is being run non-interactively. The flag probably isn’t needed for a cron job, because root probably can sudo as any user without a password, but it doesn’t hurt either.