Can I schedule processes?

Rodders

Does anybody know what I need to schedule some processes?

Let's say I want a process to run against my database in the middle of the night without having to manually start it or be connected to the net.

I'm guessing this is going to need some software on the server and possibly my host will need to support its use.

Wien

Do you want to run PHP scripts automatically at specified times, if you do this is provided by CRON on Unix server, and if you use Windows I remember something similar, called AT command, or something like that.
What is your server OS ?

surfer

I 've been looking for that same solution for a while. So far, i couldn'find anything in the PHP Doc regarding task scheduling. IMHPOV the problem is, a script to schedule any task must run continiously... our PHP scripts don't.

A solution (at least for a windows user) may be the use of a COM componant on the server machine. The PHP script will use a COM Object provided by that component to set the time on which the task is to be accomplished and privide the script to run. The COM componant (wich is run continiously) can then, at the fixed time, run the specified script.

Just an idea, hope it can lead us to a better solution
🆒

irish

If your host has PHP compiled as a standalone module in addition to or instead of as an Apache DSO, you can use PHP scripts in a manner very similar to perl scripts, right from the shell.

You have to add the shebang line, #!/usr/bin/php, but then you can set a cronjob that will run the script at your specified interval.

My company site does this to generate a cached page for our news links every 15 minutes, so we don't need to parse a bunch of huge XML files each time the page is loaded.

Rodders

I have found out that my server is UNIX. I am waiting a response from the host for more information about running scheduled processes.

dalecosp

A UNIX system without cron running would be a rare beast. The question, of course, is will they help you?

If they're not willing to run a php standalone module as irish mentioned, you might see if they have lynx installed, and verify whether calling the script from it, via cron, would activitate whatever process you wished to have run....