Dunno about hostgator, but here are some generic things to look at:
1) Running as a user or as root?
2) cron.allow / cron.deny provisioned correctly?
3) What does your entire crontab entry look like?
4) What output are you getting from cron when the job runs? Check the owner's email...
5) Can you get a basic job to run? E.g., can you setup a 'echo "hello,world"' to run once a minute? No point in trying to do anything more complicated, if this base case is causing problems.
6) Obvious, I know, but is your path to perl correct?
7) Your command line looks correct but, what happens if you add
to the first line of script.pl and
?
My guess would be that you are having problems at #5 above. Once you get that fixed, you ought to be able to do what you want pretty easily.
--Ma