Automating a process on a server

[Anon]

Hello,

i'm trying to automate a phpscript on a server. But i don't know how to? I want it to run every 4 hours. I've read about cron or something like that, but i haven't found a good tutorial. Can anybody help me by posting an example script or some other help??

Tnx in advance

[khaine]

running a cron is quite easy when you know how. If you have a 'nix system try man crontab it has a lot of info.

I think you will need to create a file doesnt really matter the name but I use crontab and put the following entry

• 0,4,8,12,16,20 * scriptname

the fields are

minute 0-59
hour 0-23
day of month 1-31
month 1-12 (or names, see below)
day of week 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)
program name

you can enter * which means all, or ranges of numbers like the one above or, for 15 mins an hour you could put

0-15, script

You just need to set the job to run then by using

crontab filename

replacing filename with what you called your file. To check that it is running type crontab -l which will list all current cron jobs. It should then run every 4 hours.

Mark.

[Anon]

to use cron to run a PHP file, I believe you need PHP running as a binary.