[TYPO3] Trouble running crawler from CLI

[J.J.W. Witteman]

I'm having trouble getting the crawler extension to run from the
command line. Running it from the backend by pressing the "Run now"
button works fine. But when I try to run it from the command line
nothing happens. I have followed all the instructions from the manual
http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/extension-manuals/crawler/current/view/1/3/
including creating a backend user named "_cli_crawler".

When I run the command shown in the backend
(/data/www/intraweb/typo3conf/ext/crawler/cli/crawler_cli.phpsh in my
case) the "Last seen" time doesn't get updated. I've added some debug
print statements in crawler_cli.phpsh to see where the script stopped
executing, and I have found that it does not get passed the line
> require(dirname(PATH_thisScript).'/'.$BACK_PATH.'init.php');

Tracing it further in init.php I have found that the script magically
stops when it tries to connect to the database. 

> // when called from crawler_clie.phpsh the script somehow stops on
the following line:
> if ($GLOBALS['TYPO3_DB']->sql_pconnect(TYPO3_db_host,
TYPO3_db_username, TYPO3_db_password))    {
>         if (!TYPO3_db)  {
>                 t3lib_BEfunc::typo3PrintError ('No database
selected','Database Error');
>                 exit;
>         } elseif (!$GLOBALS['TYPO3_DB']->sql_select_db(TYPO3_db))    
  {
>                 t3lib_BEfunc::typo3PrintError ('Cannot connect to the
current database, "'.TYPO3_db.'"','Database Error');
>                 exit;
>         }
> } else {
>         t3lib_BEfunc::typo3PrintError ('The current username,
password or host was not accepted when the connection to the database
was attempted to be established!','Database Error');
>         exit;
> }


What could be wrong?

Thanks for any advice

PS I'm running Typo3 version 4.0

jwittema at yahoo.com

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