cron tab

[phpprog]

Hi all,
I have a php script, which should run daily once. We are using freebSD. How do i run this script using crontab.

Plz help

[devinemke]

create a plain ASCII text file file called crontab and add:

0 0 * /path/to/phpscript.php >/path/to/output.txt 2>/path/to/error.err

replace /path/to/phpscript.php to wherever your script is
replace /path/to/output.txt to wherever you want the script output to go
replace /path/to/error.err to wherever you want the script errors to go

upload this to your /etc folder. this will run the script every night at midnight. depending on your webserver config you may have to put the path to the PHP excecutable in a shebang statement at the top of your script and CHMOD 755 the script. either that or put the path to PHP in your crontab with the script as a command line argument like: /usr/local/bin/php /path/to/phpscript.php

[eoghain]

Do you have PHP setup for command line processing? If so you will need to add #!/usr/bin/php (or whatever the path to your php command line interpreter is) to the top of the script to be run, and chmod it to be executable by the user who's cron job will run the script. Then you use 'crontab -e' to open up the list of cron jobs and enter the appropriate information:

0 3 * * 1,3 /path/to/php/script/myscript.php

This would run at 3am on every Monday and Wednesday, look at the crontab man pages for the proper setup of this file.

If you don't have PHP setup for command line processing then you will need to have a text only browser, like lynx, that you can use to call the page. If this is how you have to do it then you just need to replace the above /path/to/... with the appropriate lynx command to open and view the php page.

[MrRosary]

Recently I was working on a site that needed regular scripts running for cleaning up databases etc.

The site is remotely hosted and the hosting company do not allow cron jobs.

In the end I used the "syncronize favourites" feature in Mozilla (I think IE has the same feature) to access and run the script on a schedule.

Quite a neat little work around I thought.....

MrRosary

[jenni]

I know this is an old post, but could MrRosary or someone else post more information about using IE synchs for a cron work-around?

[superwormy]

You can use Windows Task Manager to schedule it to open up the webpage at a certain time every day locally from your comptuer...

You can also tell the Crontab to use wget or lynx to fetch the page if PHP does not run on the commandline on your server.