simple error log solution?

phence

I recently just took my first hack at a mass mailer script and I have assigned cron to lynx my script every half hour...

the script source can be found here

I have never built an exhaustive error logging class or script.
I am not sure how to handle the errors that I might recieve when testing out my new mailing script. I don't want the browser to receive the errors, I would like to write them to a .txt file.

I've done some reading on the PHP manual regading 'error_log' and similar functions. I would rather not do this:

$get_mailing = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM newsletters_saved 
    WHERE status = 'incomplete' ORDER BY date_sent ASC LIMIT 1;") 
    or (error_log(date("D M j G:i:s T Y") . ": " 
        mysql_error(), 4, '/path/to/logs/errors.txt'));

in case the are other errors with the entire script..

Is there simple way to just tell php at the beginning of the script to write all errors to the error log file?

Thanks,
Phence

crazychris

I have a php based cron job, and it emails me results if there are any. Goes kinda like this:

<?php
## This file is to be executed every hour, and depending on the day/time, will do stuff.
ob_start();
set_time_limit(0); 
$runtime=date("jS F Y H:i:s");

// do stuff,  use print/echo and whatever you need //

# Send a copy of what would have been output
$out=ob_get_contents();
$fintime=date("jS F Y H:i:s");
if ($out) {
	mail("me@here","CRON",$runtime."\n\n".$out."\n\n".$fintime,"From: Me <me@here>");
}
ob_end_clean();

This will do a cupla thing.

Run, and if nothing happens (as often does) no email is sent.
Runs and if something happens, error or report, it is emailed to me with the start time and end time and all the messages which would have been displayed on the browser.

Have been running this solution for about 3 years, and it's yet to skip a beat.