Scheduled Script

demonicfoetus

Hi there, i want to make a script which will perform a certain group of actions on the hour, every hour.

My first idea was to make a script which i run once and then it loops round and round checking to see if the hour has increased since it last recorded it in a variable. If the hour has increased then it will run the tasks.

However, am i right in thinking this script would be very system resource eating since its almost an infinite loop.

Does anyone have an idea how to do this without causing so much resource drain?

Thanks for the help in advance,
DF

echo

If your on a Linux server and your hosting co allow, use your crontab file.

demonicfoetus

This is my server config:
Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) PHP/4.0.6 mod_perl/1.24

So i guess i can use one, so wot are they and do you know a good tutorial/manual on them please

thanks
-DF

yeochins

I'm gonna repeat the book!

heres the cron tab

30 22 * * * lynx --dump [url]http://www.[/url]
yourdomain.com/thecronfile.php > /dev/null

The crontab format dictates that each line contain six fields seperated by spaces or tabs. The first five represent in order, minutes, hours, days, months, and the day of the week (from 0 to 6, with 0 being sunday). You can specify the day of the operation as either day of the month (1-31) or a day of the week, the latter being date-indifferent.

now when you save the tab save it as cronjob1 with no extension, then access the server command line interface then enter the code (change the path if neccessary but keep crontab before the path, and the path must start with /

contab /path/to/cronjob1

then press enter/return and then to confirm the task

crontab -(1 or l cant remember which)

then press return/enter than tada your done.

demonicfoetus

Er, how do i access the command line (through a java applet?) cos i'm not running the server off my PC; its my hosts server.

yeochins

You can access the command line through wsftp's FTP command under 'site' although I'm not sure about other ftp sites and your server must support cron.