howto schedle mail()?

[Anon]

i'd like to set up a script that emailed a page every 4 hours for 3 days (or whatever) using php. anyone know of a way to schedule tasks w/ php?

i'd rather avoid writing to a crontab file or anything too messy.

the idea would be someone could visit http://www.uac.pdx.edu/weather.php and email the "Current METAR Translated" to their phone every couple hours for the weekend they were on the mountin.

feedback on this would be much appreciated.

nick

[kailien]

My suggestion would be standalone / cgi version of PHP and Cron job.

Write a php script to do exactly what you want. In this case retrieve the latest METAR info and email it. Then, set a cron job to execute this script at the time your specified.

Kai

[dannys]

He said he didn't want a cron job! I'll admit it's the way to go though 🙂

I suppose there is another way you could do it though. You'll need to be getting a fair amount of traffic.

You could have a small function in your index.php, or other frequently visited page, which simply checked to see when the mail was last sent (a db entry, or a file on server).
If the time is more than the set limit (say 4 hours) then the function could run the send mail routines and update the db entry or file to reflect the current time.

You really need to be getting at least one vistor per 1 hour to make this run properly, so i'd only use it as a last resort.

I personally wouldn't recommend it for sending weather updates to mountainers though, but it's something work on 🙂