Most Efficient Cronjob To Run A Php Script

[section31]

Still new at cron jobs / unix command line so go easy. Whats the most efficient way to run a php file through the crontab. The php file i plan to execute resets a certain counter in my database, i want to have this done weekly. I've come up with

 

>00**0 lynx -dump http://www.torrentlinks.com/reset.php

 

However, I'm not sure if there is an easier way than using the lynx browser...is there?

 

If someone could give me a nice site on sample crontabs that would help a bunch...

 

Thanks,

Dave

[chuckmalani]

check out this link... http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.p...id/1005/fid/436

 

something tells me you might not have to run it through a browser.

 

you could do something like this...

 

>> crontab -e

(within the editor)
00 12 1 * 0 0 /home/youracct/path/to/yourscript.php

 

BUT, and this is a big but... only do this if you know what you are doing! i have never used a cron job before, so I could have told you the completely wrong thing to do!! I got my info from that site and the crontab man page

 

chuck

[dozure]

don't believe a php file can be run from a command line. has to be processed by a browser. lynx is probably the best bet

[chuckmalani]

ah ok, now i learned something...

 

thanks dozure...

[matman]

Not exactly true.

 

PHP scripts can indeed be run from the command line or by a cron job. I'm not sure if the TCH servers are set up to allow this or not -- not sure if our cron jobs can access /usr/bin/php or not. Without shell access to experiment with the results I'd be rather wary to experiment with this.

 

From the PHP manual:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php

However, there's another way of using PHP for shell scripting. You can write a script where the first line starts with #!/usr/bin/php. Following this you can place normal PHP code included within the PHP starting and end tags. Once you have set the execution attributes of the file appropriately (e.g. chmod +x test) your script can be executed like a normal shell or perl script:

 

#!/usr/bin/php

<?php

    var_dump($argv);

?>

[chuckmalani]

matman saves the day...

[dozure]

ahh yes i didn't think about that...

[DirkNiblick]

I am actually trying to run a php script from the cron. I've tried the "shell script" example and this one:

 

* * * * * php /home/yadda/public_html/test.php

 

It works alright, but it sends an e-mail from the Cron every time it executes. (it's doing it every minute for testing purposes only) Does anyone know how to prevent the e-mails?

 

The e-mail contains:

 

Content-type: text/html

X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.1

[dozure]

you could set up a filter to automaticlly move messages from Cron Daemon to your trash