[RESOLVED] Automated background tasks

[Galavantes]

I would like to make a script that would automatically generate a thank-you email to be sent out to first-time customers who visit my site. But I want to delay the email until approx noon on the day following their order. The only way I know to delay any action in PHP is sleep(), which will also hault any other script that calls that function.
I know this can be done as most major websites generate emails on a daily/weekly basis. Any tips?

[Weedpacket]

Any decent operating system will provide a facility to allow you to schedule programs to run on a periodic basis (traditionally they're called "cron jobs" after the program that does this job on Unix systems). What you'd be wanting is a program to run at noon each day that checks the database for suitable orders (those by first-time customers) and sends out the emails.

[Galavantes]

I did stumble upon cronjobs in my searches for asynchronous tasks, although I couldn't find any decent information on how to execute one. Would it simply be setup to run an external php script at certain intervals?

[Galavantes]

Ok I did some searching on my web host's control panel and found the cron wizard they provide, pretty straight forward. Just runs any php script. Exactly what I needed, thanks