Cron Daemon Error Related To ionCube

I have set up a cron job to run every 5 minutes, however, I'm getting the following error from the cron daemon:

Site error: the file <b>/home/domain.com/public_html/pipe/pop.php</b>
requires the ionCube PHP Loader ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so to be installed by the
site administrator.

Which doesn't make much sense to me as ionCube is enabled on my server. I can see it in the phpinfo() output as well as I have already installed application that requires ionCube to work and it went smoothly.

This is the cron job:

php -q /home/domain.com/public_html/pipe/pop.php

I am using Debian 5 x86-64

On Debian I there are different php ini files for the cli binary and mod_php in apache.

have a look the configuration files in /etc/php5/

you should have /etc/php5/cli/php.ini and /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

it is possible that the ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so stuff is only present in the ini file for apache2.

Who is the cron job running as? It's probably an environment variable issue. Check the variables with ENV between the user cron is running as (probably root) and the user you regularly run the program as.