Problems with cron

[jpmarichal]

I have a site named www.soymormon.com. I display in it some news and I have a daily mailing list with 1,500 subscriber. I made a .php that retrieves the news from the database, merge it with a template and sends the mail. This is in a beta stage.

Recently, my hosting company gave me cron facilities, not through telnet, but with a web interface. I'm a newbie on this and I don't know too much UNIX. I read somewhere that I can use the lynx command to execute a php. So I put it in a cron and ran it every minute to test it. When I tested it enough I tried to move it to a daily schedule, but my hosting company disconected the site because the lynx command was using too much cpu resources.

The site is up again, but I'm learning the hard way. How must I setup the cron to run in a daily base (how to setup the cron numbers)? I can see that the problem with lynx is that it start but don't stop, right? How to execute my php only once a day then stop the lynx command to avoid the useless compsumption of cpu resources?

[Anon]

As far as how the crontab (the cron config file) should be setup, the numbers should read:

• * 0,1,2,3,4,5,6

and to run lynx to execute a php script you'll want to run it as:

lynx -source http://www.host.com/script.php > /dev/null

which has lynx fetch the page and dump the source and then exit, and of course redirecting it to /dev/null will stop it from outputting anything.

So in the end, the line of the crontab should look like:

• * 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 lynx -source http://www.host.com/script.php > /dev/null

you may actually have to define the exact path of lynx depending on how your host is setup, it will most commonly be in /usr/bin/lynx, or /usr/local/bin/lynx

Hope this helps!

[jpmarichal]

Thanks a lot! What part of the command stops lynks? What are the 0,1,2... stand for?

Rob Sayers wrote:

As far as how the crontab (the cron config file) should be setup, the numbers should read:

• * 0,1,2,3,4,5,6

and to run lynx to execute a php script you'll want to run it as:

lynx -source http://www.host.com/script.php > /dev/null

which has lynx fetch the page and dump the source and then exit, and of course redirecting it to /dev/null will stop it from outputting anything.

So in the end, the line of the crontab should look like:

• * 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 lynx -source http://www.host.com/script.php > /dev/null

you may actually have to define the exact path of lynx depending on how your host is setup, it will most commonly be in /usr/bin/lynx, or /usr/local/bin/lynx

Hope this helps!