PHP with cron jobs

rakennedy75

I have just come across a script someone wrote for creating cron jobs through php. I am not real familiar with this but I want to know what is involved. I would like to attempt to create something like this. All I need is a cron job that will run a php script.

I know this can be done because I use a third party hosting company that allows you to do this.

Any direction on this would be great or documentation on this would be appreciated.

Thanks for your time

devinemke

you might want to read up on cron here.
here's the basic syntax:

* * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/script.php >/path/to/output.log 2>/path/to/errors.err

the first 5 asterisks are:
minute 00 to 59
hour 00 to 23 (military time)
day 1 to 31
month 1 to 12
weekday 0 to 6 (0=Sunday) Note: Linux uses sun, mon...

rakennedy75

OK, thanks for the response. I probably wasn't real clear on my question, I was afraid of that.

I guess what I meant was I would like to make an interface through php to dynamically set up the cron jobs through a php front end. Right now the guy that runs my servers isn't very good and doesn't know much about cronjobs. I believe he has to set these up through a command line. It would make things much easier if I can create the cron jobs straight from a web interface (Not sure if this is difficult)

Anyway, this might be way beyond my current abilities but I would like to start learning how to accomplish this type of stuff.

By the way, the link you provided was helpful in other ways. Thanks again for your time.

devinemke

the crontab file is just a plain text file. PHP has plenty of functions for reading and writing to text files:

[man]fopen[/man]
[man]fread[/man]
[man]fwrite[/man]

you could just create a standard HTML form that promts the user for the time interval and various paths and then [man]fwrite[/man] it all to the crontab.

Ceril

Originally posted by devinemke
the crontab file is just a plain text file. PHP has plenty of functions for reading and writing to text files:

[man]fopen[/man]
[man]fread[/man]
[man]fwrite[/man]

you could just create a standard HTML form that promts the user for the time interval and various paths and then [man]fwrite[/man] it all to the crontab.

With some security, else the owner of the server might get an unpleasent suprise :-)