Running already established cron job via PHP

[ywickham]

Is it possible to run an already established crontab job via a PHP script? Basically, I want the job to be run as called without need for logging into Webmin.

Currently, I'm running into issues with the script needing to run as root (which is how it is setup in the crontab), but my needing to run the script from the browser (apache). I thought of calling it in the script directly, but I didn't think I could chown from apache to root in the apache-run PHP script.

Is this possible? If so, what would that look like?

Thanks!

[ixalmida]

You can generally run shell scripts from within a web page.

Here's one that works for me:

$command = "sudo -u root /srv/www/incentive/incentive.py --create-data-set";
$result = exec($command);

Of course, that one is Python. I would assume you have to invoke the PHP interpreter to run a PHP script as a shell script:

$command = "sudo -u root /usr/bin/php -f /srv/www/ap/scripts/populate_vendors.php";
$result = exec($command);