PHP script timer

Anon

I need to run my php script automatically once a day. Does somebody know any timer programm, kind of a spider?

brandonschnell

crontab. or if you're on winnt try the "at" command.

Anon

What is crontab and how I can use it?
Where I can get info to read about it?

Anon

crontab is a linux daemon allowing you to have scripts called on a specified time and/or time intervall (e.g. once a day) but you can't use it with the apache module version of PHP you need the "standalone" CGI version of PHP to have PHP scripts executed by a cronjob (IMHO thats what you call an entry in crontab... but i'm not an linuxexpert). If you have the module version of php and no chance to get the cgi version you can still place a script on your page and put an entry in crontab to call this script with lynx once a day, but that's quite dangerous, because a lot of people write the entry wrong and the lynx instance gets not closed properly ... thus bringing your webserver down because it runs out of memory, my provider e.g. refuses to have cronjobs that use lynx ... I guess he knows why 🙂 ...
hope that helps a bit and if not, don't bother to ask again, there are quite a few guys here that are more familiar with that kind of stuff than me 🙂
cya Rob

Anon

"but you can't use it with the apache module version of PHP"

This is what we have 🙁

Anon

OK
for everybody:

On download.com there is a program called "schedule wizard" !!!!!!!!

Anon

Another solution (again using cron) is to schedule lynx (linux/unix text based browser) to fetch your page/script at a specified time, ie your cron entry would be /something/ like..

0 23 * /usr/bin/lynx -dump http://www.mysite.org/scripts/doitbaby.php > /dev/null

This will force the webserver at www.mysite.org to run /scripts/doitbaby.php, at 11pm every night (the output of the script will be redirected to null (or you could dump it to stdout (remove the > /dev/null bit) in which case the output would be appended to the root mail file (or whoevers the process ran as) - meaning that you could periodically check that it was working.