LYNX and Crontab

nikko50

I'm looking to call a php page nightly.
How can a tell if I have a php command line interpreter on my server at work. If I don't have that I can call the php page with LYNX using crontab??? Is this true and can I have an example of the crontab entry. Thanks for the help guys.
Tracy🙂

drew010

If its running on linux, the php interpreter can be called as the cli version just the same.
an sample crontab for running a script nightly would be

0 0 * php -f /path/to/script.php

The crontab format is

minute  hour  day of month  month  day of week  'command'
 0-59    0-24    1-31       1-12       0-6

So you can have something like
0 17 5 php -f /script.php # run at 5PM every Friday
/5 1-5 php -f /script2.php # run every 5 minutes monday - friday

nikko50

Thanks will give it a try.

nikko50

I have the below in crontab and it won't work. I think this is supposed to run every minute???
* php -f /test/cars/cron.php

anyway I can output in an error file??

drew010

php -f /test/cast/cron.php > out.txt

you must pass an absolute path so i think maybe thats the problem.

devinemke

* * * * *  /path/to/php /path/to/script.php >/path/to/output.txt 2>/path/to/error.txt

nikko50

Hi Drew.
Will try that and get back to you. Thanks

nikko50

This is what I have now..
* php -f /test/cars/cron.php > /test/cars/out.txt
Still nothing and no output into the out.txt file. Any more suggestions??? Thanks for all the help.
Tracy

drew010

you can put
MAILTO="you@yoursite.com"
as the top line and it will email you the output of the command.

nikko50

I can do this in my crontab and the output will be mailed to me??

MAILTO="tracy@mysite.com"
* php -f /test/cars/cron.php

drew010

indeed. only recommended for debugging or infrequent jobs as it can be annoying to receive these emails a lot.

nikko50

Page does not get called but I do get an email that states this. What does this mean?

/bin/sh: php: command not found

MAILTO="xxxxxxxxf@yahoo.com"
* php -f /path/29/d90388361/htdocs/cron.php

drew010

i guess wherever php is installed is registered in the PATH environment variable. in this case, like devin said, just use
* /usr/bin/php -f /path/29/d90388361/htdocs/cron.php

of course substitute /usr/bin/php for its real path if thats not it.