I'm using cron and fetchmail to poll a mail server on a regular basis. For sake of redundant record keeping, I need to log the output of the fetchmail command every time it is run. This is not hard, as all I need to do is redirect it to a log file with a >> in the cron line.

My issue is that this method produces the file I want, but there are no time or date stamps. I wrote a small script in perl that does nothing but take a line as input, append a time stamp to the front, then print the combined line.

So now I have 2 questions:

1. When I pass the output of fetchmail into this script (addts) with:

I get this error:
entering the password I get:
is this an issue with the script running in it's own shell?

2. I can redirect the output of fetchmail into the addts script, but how can I then redirect that output into a log file all on one line? Would it be something like:

You don't re-direct into a process using the > operator. You use a pipe, e.g.
> is for re-directing into files, not processes.