I've been running into a very strange problem with that:
When I run the script from the shell with the command it is supposed
to run from cron:
/home/duke/eggdrop/botchk >/dev/null 2>&1
everything goes fine and bot is started.
But if I let run the exact same command from within cron,
the bot is started, but neither comes to irc, nor accepts telnet connections or anything else. Additionally it hogs 99% CPU usage until I 'kill -9' it.