editing crontab files

Hi

Using VIM (VI) on OSX to open and edit a crontab file. I have managed to understand some of the syntax and got crontab to execute a counter.php script which stores its count in a .txt file. If i go to my .txt file and refresh the browser every minute I can see that the cron job is working as i asked it however I was working from two tutorials and both had different commands.

can you tell me - whats the difference between...

* * * * * . counter.php
and...
* * * * * lynx -dump counter.php

the latter works and executes my php file however the former does'nt seem to do anything??

can anyone recommend a crontab resource with all the commands?

a+
gar

A .php file isn't executable by itself. It needs to be run through a PHP processor/interpreter and this is what happens when you hit the webpage -- the webserver fires off the PHP interpreter, which actually executes the PHP code.

Hence you cannot execute the PHP file directly from the command line -- you need to get the webserver to process the page. The second crontab line does that -- it fires off lynx (which is a text mode webbrowser), which hits the webpage and therefore causes the webserver to execute the PHP script/