PHP Script Inside "cgi-local" Directory For Cron Job

Volitics

I have a shared web hosting. The hosting service provider has set up a cron job to run a script.

The shared web hosting has a "cgi-local" directory for scripts (instead of a "cgi-bin").

According to the web hosting documentation the script must be inside the "cgi-local" directory to work (if I'm reading the documentation right).

The documentation says to create a file with the following lines:

#!/bin/sh

/u/web/userid/cgi-local/script1.pl

then name the file "cron.sh", and then install the "cron.sh" file inside the "cgi-local" directory folder. I've done all of that.

There is only one problem, though. I have a PHP script, not a Perl script. My PHP script works fine outside of the cgi-local directory. But when I put the PHP script inside the cgi-local directory I get a server 500 error message.

I have a couple of questions: 1). Is a PHP script supposed to work inside a "cgi-local" directory? and 2). If so, what do I need to do to get the PHP script to work inside the "cgi-local" directory.

Thanks.

bubblenut

Have you put the shebang(hash # bang !) line at the top? If you're running a script from the command line you need to tell the shell which program is going to run it (in your example the line at the top #!/bin/sh is saying use sh (a shell) which can be found in the /bin directory to fin this file). There are two things you can do with your php file, you can either change the entry in the cron file to something like
/usr/bin/php -q /u/web/userid/cgi-local/script.php
(assuming php is to be found in /usr/bin/ , do locate php | grep "\/php$" to find where it is)
or you can add a shebang line like the following to your php script (it must be the first line and the hash must be the first character)
#!/usr/bin/php -q
HTH
Bubble
P.S.
The line
locate php | grep "\/php$" will take quite a while so be patient. What it's doing is searching the locate database for all filenames contaning php (this will be a lot of files then passing each of these through the Global Regular Expresion Print (grep) function to match only files which end in /php (ie the actual file name is just php).
If no-one has ever used locate on the system (unlikely but distinctly possible) you may have to build the locate database (don't worry you don't actually have to do anything) just type locate -u at the command prompt and then leave it to run.

Volitics

Thanks for responding to my problem.

It's a shared web hosting. I don't have access to the server shell. I don't even have a cgi-bin folder. What I've got is a "cgi-local" folder.

What you're saying is find the location of PHP (i.e. path to PHP) on the server - then put a shebang line at the top of my PHP script so that the server will know where to find PHP?

Thanks.