Want to e-mail my users on there b-day!!

Anon

Hello I have an address book that I built in PHP that keep track of all of the employee's information. I have now been asked to create a script to automatically e-mail the employee a certain message on there birthday. My quesiton is what is the best way to do this? Whould/should I have cron run the script everynight or is there a better way...

In my employee table I have an ID, Name, Email, Phone_Num, Title and Birthday column.

Any of your suggestions would be much appreciated!!!

Anon

It's hard to beat cron for periodically repeating tasks. If you don't have the standalone version of php installed, your cron script can call wget or lynx to load a php page that does the task.

Anon

I have never used LYNX or wget how would the cron second half of the cron job look like?

Anon

I don't know anything about "cron", but I may be able to help you:

How do you have the employee's birthdays, in a database? In a text file?
also, what format do you have the birthday data,
Which format is it listed:
January 2
1/2
1-2

If in a database, do you have the month and date in separate fields?

say you have the data like 1/2
this is like:

print date("n/j");

so, maybe you write some code to check your database (or file) for a row
where today's date equals the date of the employees bday, then you set an exact time on the date and when that date and time are reached, mail an email to those with the day's date birthday

confusing,
well it's an idea, email if you
sammy

Anon

Taken from: http://www.phpbuilder.com/forum/archives/1/2000/07/1/100251

Something like this....

10 1 1 /usr/bin/wget -q http://www.mydomain.com/php/birthday.php