What is the best method for running scheduled jobs in PHP?

[mikemike27]

I have a webpage form that requires a date and time to be submitted. When it's submitted I need the back-end to run a script at the time and date specified.

Have you ever needed to do something like this? I've tried the exec() function with an at command inside. It won't work. I have no idea why and there doesn't seem to be a lot of advice on google about this. so either no one has ever had a problem with it before or no one has ever tried because there is a much simplier way.

I've also tried a shell script but I didn't really understand what I was typing. It was mostly a guess. Here it is;

$fileOutput = "#!/bin/bash\n\n";
$fileOutput.= "php ".$doc_root."/byot/author/publish_tables.php jobid=".$jobid." ".$result." catid=".$catid." docroot=".$doc_root;

$myFile = $doc_root."/byot/author/publishjob".$jobid.".sh";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
fwrite($fh, $fileOutput);
fclose($fh);

shell_exec('chmod a+x '.$myFile);

$fileOutput = "#!/bin/bash\n\n";
$fileOutput.= "at $publishTime $publishday.$publishmonth.$publishyear -f $myFile";

$runfile = $doc_root."/byot/author/runat".$jobid.".sh";
$fh = fopen($runfile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
fwrite($fh, $fileOutput);
fclose($fh);

shell_exec('chmod a+x '.$runfile);
exec($runfile);

Any tips or advice greatly appreciated!

[laserlight]

If you are able to modify a cron table (or set some other process scheduler), then one possibility is to have the PHP script update the cron table.

[dagon]

I would store the date and time in a db table, have a cron job call a php script to check the db every X frequency and run the specific script if needed.