How on Earth can I do this...

tony_l

Well most of the site is up now, thanks to the help of the users in this forum.

Now I have a BIG problem which I know will be difficult for me since I am a newbie, however I have learned alot in the last 2 months.

Ok here is what I am attempting to do:

I have a database FULL of members. We are anticipating that some members will start to become inactive. I need to construct a script that AUTOMATICALLY run every month on a certain date. This script will look at the emails of each member and email them a Confirmation type of email. They would then click on a link and it would re-activate their account.

The problem I am having bascially is that I need to find out HOW to get a program to run by itself every month. I am confident that I can write the scripts that email teh members, and setting the database up (have a column that would have a value of 1 for confirmed and 0 for unconfirmed).

Can anyone point me to what I need in order to be able to accomplish this task?

Thanks guys!

samharwin

Check out crontab:

http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/tips/cron/cron.html

http://perlcoders.com/main/crontab.html

http://www.superscripts.com/tutorial/crontab.html

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/crontab.html

tony_l

Oh MY GOD!!

That is wonderful man, i had no clue that that existed, and those tutorials explained it nicely and simply!

You know my PHP book never got into that stuff.

I just wish there was a book specifically for Internet programmers and all these little things would be much clearer. For instance, it took me awhile to figure out what the heck peoplewere talking about whne they were talking about HTTP HEADERS LOL.

Thanks!

Anon

Well, it's not a PHP thing, so it wouldn't necessarily get into the PHP books.

As for books that do cover this sort of thing, O'Reilly has a whole library. Linux, TCP/IP, PHP, Apache, whatsyourfancy.

http://www.oreilly.com/

tony_l

Thanks Guys!

Everytime I come on here I learn so much!