PHP automation

Anon

Two questions really.

Can PHP be used to automatically backup a database, ie can I set it to get a database dump at 4am every morning, obviously this is a good time as most people arn't around, but I can't be up at 4am every morning if I want to remain reasonably sane :-)

The other question is can PHP do things automatically with user prompting, say a user logs on, after 10 minutes can it automatically execute a script, or does the user always have to click on something? I know you can set events to occur as soon as they enter the page, but can this be done with a timer.

Thanks for any feedback

Anon

If you are running in Unix or Linux you can always set a cron job to backup your database every morning.

Anon

yes, learn about crontab - this is something you use for automating things. you can tell it to run your script [bash, php, whatever script] at certain times, like:

every monday at 7AM, everyday at 8.30PM, every 5 minutes, etc etc

in your case i would use it to run a bash script which would dump mysql data to a file and zip everything. of course you can use php script for the same thing.

spyder

Your first question has been well answered so I might as well have a go at the 2nd one...

If you want something to happen after 10 minutes of a user viewing a page then you could do this:

The above code goes in your <HEAD> tag and will cause the page to redirect to myscript.php after 10 minutes (600 seconds).

Good luck,

Stephen

arnihr

the page only refreshes itself when someone is at the page...

So, why refreshing to check if he's gone?

spyder

Thats not how I read it ArniHr - Its very hard to tell what users do and you can't always have them logging in or out everytime... You just have to guess what they might do a lot of the time...

If you want to check if a user is still logged in you could store the login time in a database and update that on each page view... then run a query that clears out all the times older than 10 minutes - ie the user hasn't done anything on the site for 10 minutes so they are probably not there....

Anon

I am trying to get cron to run a php script and am having a little trouble.

The following is my line in tHe crontab file

10,20,30,40,50 //DirStructureToMyPhpFile/test.php

The file does not run every ten minutes as I would like it to. Do I need to add a command to tell cron I want a php file to be run. Or have I messed up on the location of the file.

Please Help.

Thanks

Anon

i dont know exact syntax for crontab right now but if you want to run a php, use lynx to run it:

10,20,30,40,50 lynx -d http://yourdomain.com/test.php

Anon

Thanks for the reply MatJaz,

I have tried the above and am having afew slight problems. The script doesn't run and I get this following error message:-'Your terminal lacks the ability to position your cursor or clear the screen.'

Do you know of this problem and how I can change it.

Thanks Again

Anon

1st: try to call lynx directly from the console and see what happens

2nd: try to send output to /dev/null, maybe it will help

lynx -d http://cnn.com > /dev/null

Anon

MMMmm I gave it a go on lynx in the console and it worked fine, but in cron I still get the same error message emailed to me. I think that maybe lynx tries to output some cursor movement or something to the screen which cron doesn't like. The output to dev/null doesn't seem to help either. I'm not quite sure what to try next, any ideas??

Thank

Anon

maybe that !#/bin/bash [i forgot the syntax!] would help?

you know:

!#/bin/bash lynx -d http://cnn.com > /dev/null

did it help?

Anon

different error this time at least 🙂

/bin/sh: !#/bin/bash: No such file or directory

if nothing else, could it be the fact we are using debian? Could it be something in the Lynx config?

Sheesh