run php script using crontab

pacuran

Hi there,
Is there possibility to run a php script from the command line?
Can I run it using crontab as well?
And if it is possible how could I do it?
I wrote down my script as script for www, and when I tried to run it it gave me errors like:
"unexpected include on line 1"
or something.
If I remove the first line, the error appears on the next.
Is there any specific thing I miss?

Thanks in advance.

Paco.

Anon

You need a standalone CGI version of PHP to run it as you would any other interpreter.
The best way to run PHP as a cron job is IMHO

lynx -d http://path.to/myscript.php > /dev/null

this way you dump the script's result to NULL; oyu get the effects, but not the output. ALternatively, you could dump the output to a file!
Luca

Anon

actually there is. what os/system are u using. if u have linux - try the following
[nilesh@eagle nilesh]$ whereis php
and if you get something like this -
php: /usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/lib/php /usr/local/lib/php.ini /usr/local/php
then you can probs execute a php file as a shell script. your php file should look like this

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?
echo "hello";
?>

now do a chmod +x file.php - what this did is give execute acess on the file to everybody. easy said than done, now you have to configure the crontab - refer to the crontab manual how to run filename.php at some intervals.
hope this helps

cheers
nilesh.

Anon

We use a program called wget. You can find it on the GNU website. It is easy to compile, install and use.

We needed to setup some cron jobs that acted on our MySQL database, but nobody really knew or wanted to learn Perl. We did however know PHP so we went out and found wget. It works very similar to the lynx solution.

#!/bin/sh

/usr/local/bin/wget -q -O /dev/null -nd http://localhost/cron_jobs/lead_mail_cro
n.php

Thta's it. It runs nice.