What can PHP do when it's startedby cron

[Anon]

Hi Guys,

I am trying to use cron to automate a task which I need to run. At the moment I am just testing the script so I am just trying to get it to send an email to me. But it is not going as expected.

What I need to know is, is there any special coding requirement that must be used when coding a script that will be executed by cron?

The script I have is just a simple mail() function call which sends an email to me. That is it? Is this allowed?

Also, once I overcome this problem I want my automated php script to check a certain email address and then log some information to a database. Is this also possible from a PHP script which is called by cron?

Thanks in advance!

[[deleted]]

You don't need to do anything special.
If it works under a webserver it also works in CGI mode.
But you may have to tell PHP which php.ini to use.

[Anon]

First, like the other reply said, you must be running the CGI version of PHP in order to run it from a cron job or the shell. Then you'd just execute it as you would any other CGI script.

If you're using the Apache module instead of the CGI version, all is not lost and you don't need to compile a CGI version of PHP just for running cron jobs...your cron can just be set up to have lynx or some other command line browser process the PHP script. I have such a cron job set up using lynx to run a PHP script that hourly creates XML (RSS) files from a datasource that I specify.

[Anon]

Hi Brian,

Well I am using the CGI version of PHP and it still is not working. I just get the reply from cron: cannot execute

This is the code I am using:

#!/usr/bin/php4 -q
<?php

mail("[e-mail]", "cron message", "This is the email sent by the crontab.", "From: [e-mail]\nReply-To: [e-mail]\n");

?>