php background process

[Anon]

I need some program to automatically check a mysql db every 5 minutes and if certain values appear in a table I want a mail sent to my pager. Can PHP do this? Or should look to perl or c?

Currently I have PHP pages built to look at the data. But that is just for browsing. I'd like to send alerts that depend on the mysql data.

Any tips?

[erokar]

You could do it using PHP, but the PHP script should be started via the cron UNIX commando. Do a search for cron on this site, that'll give you the needed information I think.