How can i do cron job for executing my PHP file?Help me!!

Hi,

How can i do cron job for executing my PHP script once in every day...

i want to remind the people about their birthday in reminder.php.

that would be one week before thier birthday and one day before their birthday...

can i perform this action with cron job??,


Can you tell me the syntax???.








------------------
shiju

the following is adapted from the script delivered with phpAds <http://www.phpwizard.net>. theoriginal used fetch instead of lynx which i believe is only available on FreeBSD or something...

59 23 * * * lynx -dump http://ads.ourdomain.net/mail.php3>>/var/log/messages

an alternative would be to use cgi php (which can be used at the same time as mod_php) in a script with #!/bin/php
(or whatever your path is) at the top like a perl cgi script

Use this perlscript it runs your php3 code..
activate the perlscript with cron.

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $url = shift;
$url = URI::URL::url($url, "http://www.??.??/cron.php3")->abs;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
use HTTP::Response;
use MIME::Base64;
my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
my $request = new HTTP::Request('GET', $url);
my $res = $ua->request($request);
my $result = ($res->is_success)?$res->content:$res->error_as_HTML;
$result = $1 if $result =~ /<BODY.*?>(.*?)</BODY>/si;
$result =~ s/(<IMG.*?SRC="?)(.*?)([" >])/$1.URI::URL::url($2, $url)->abs.$3/gies;
$result =~ s/(<A.*?HREF="?)(.*?)([" >])/$1.URI::URL::url($2, $url)->abs.$3/gies;


[This message has been edited by jochum (edited June 01, 2000).]

This is how we do it here at ngenuity.
Simply compile PHP as a CGI binary and move it to somewhere convenient, such as /usr/bin/.

Then make the first line of the script
#!/usr/bin/php

this tells the OS what program to process the script with, exacly like the famous
#!/usr/bin/perl
used in perl or the less famous
#!/bin/sh
used for most shell scripts.

Then in the cron tab, you can call the script directly i.e. /data/servers/www.devshed.com/scripts/script.php

This works great, especially if it is a sensitive script... you can keep it out of your web root and accessable only to your crond.

Do be sure to keep all the script within <?php ?> tags.

#!/usr/bin/php
<?
...script here...
?>

Anything print()ed, or echo()ed will be output to stdout, as will anything not in <?php ?>.

One more question: what if I don't have access to cron on my unix system (I am using a host).
Is there a way to call lynx from a php page?
And then not wait for the process to finish?

Thanks so much
Sergio

>>what if I don't have access to cron on my unix system
Can you run cron locally then? Or another system with cron access remotely to your unix system?

>>what if I don't have access to cron on my unix system <<

You shouldn't have access to run cron. You need to run crontab to configure cron.

Just goes to show you...learn something new everyday.