seting/updating a cron job from PHP

[ovisopa]

Hello ppl,

i'm developing a wap site (wap.sibiul.ro) i started the work on this site again after a long break ... and now I have some questions.

Can I set or update an existing cron job from a php script ?? I want that when somebody enters my site and his HTTP_PROFILE does not exist in my db to setup or update an existing cron to run in the next minute. Can this be done from an php script ?

10x in advance

see ya

[yelvington]

The Web server would have access to its own (virtual user) crontab. However, if I were doing this, I would use a database to record the tasks that need doing, and a single cron process that would check the db and do the work.

[ovisopa]

If i will insert the request in a db I will need to make that cron job run verry offten .

What I want is this, when a user is accesing my site first in the index file will be made an verification if that phone profile alredy exist, I need few infos from the page is stored in the HTTP_PROFILE header (ex. header http://wap.sonyericsson.com/UAprof/T610R101.xml ) I need to parse that file to store in my db the size of the screen in pixels and if it is color or not. I have some doubs about how I'm gonna parse that file, I never used PHP and XML 🙁 .. but this is a diferent story.

So my script is checking in the db for existing phone profile, if already exist I will sckip the cron job , but If there is no phone profile like the curent one than a comand should update the cron job "UAPROFILES" for running in the next minute. The script which the cron job will run will do the xml parsing job and storing the results in the database.

I need this for my photo gallery, now I have only one album but soon I will have many more .. and when a user is chosing to download an wallpaper the image should fit his screen perfectly, if I know the screen size I (PHP) can play with that picture .

And I want to make my wap site with templates, for old phones and for new color phones.

Another question 🙂, I inserted this part of script

if($HTTP_PROFILE){
	$actual_profile = $HTTP_PROFILE;
	$chk_profile = mysql_num_rows(mysql_query("SELECT * FROM wap_phone_profile WHERE profile='$actual_profile'")) or die(mysql_error());
	switch($chk_profile){
		case '0' : //INSERT NEW PHONE PROFILE
			$q_ins_prf = mysql_query("INSERT INTO wap_phone_profile (`id`, `profile`, `brand`) VALUES ('', '$actual_profile', '')") or die(mysql_error());
			break 1;
		default: break 1;
	}
}

but it is curios because nothing inserted in my db in few hours 🙁 (I have aprox. 100 vizitors/day ) can I take the HTTP_PROFILE by other way ?? .. using other syntax ?

10x in advance

see ya

[travelbuff]

Do you need it to run as a cron job? why not run it using system(), exec() or shell_exec() ?

Do you have shell access on your server?

One option would be to write the data to a txt file and then have a cron job check the file every minute and if it was not empty it could add data to the db and then delete the data in the txt file. This would not create too much overhead as the cron job script would only have to check filesize and then go back to sleep if the text file was empty.

However, you are much better off to do this via a shell command from php unless there is some reason that you cannot....